The Price of a Memory
by origamifrog23
Summary: A few months after the events of How to Stop an Exploding Man, Claude meets Peter again to find he’s not the person Claude once knew. Now Claude has to find out why. Warning: slash
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **The Price of a Memory (1/17)

**Characters: **Claude, Peter, Mohinder, special guest appearances by Molly and Nathan

**Pairings: **Peter/Claude eventually

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **slash

**Spoilers: **Through the end of Season One. Written _before_ Season Two, so AU after that but shares some parallels with certain elements from the newer season.

**Summary: **A few months after the events of How to Stop an Exploding Man, Claude meets Peter again to find he's not the person Claude once knew. Now Claude has to find out why.

**Disclaimer: **Heroes and the associated characters don't belong to me.

**The Price of a Memory**

**Part 1/17**

The next time Claude saw Peter, he was on one knee in the middle of a busy sidewalk tying the shoe of a small child. Hair short and clothes more adult than anything the invisible man had seen him in before, Claude might not have recognized him except for the overly serious look on his face as he took the shoelaces through the motions at a slow, deliberate pace while the girl stood with one hand on his shoulder, watching avidly. How touching. When he was finished, the girl beamed, holding out her foot like Cinderella at the ball. Really, she looked far too old to be needing her laces tied for her but Peter wasn't the type to let someone else's kid crack their head open on the sidewalk out of neglect, even if it meant blocking pedestrian traffic in the most annoying way possible to do it.

Taking the girl's hand loosely in his own, the two started walking together again. That might have been the end of it except they were walking in Claude's direction. Invisible as he was, it went without saying that there was no risk of the boy seeing him but as he wasn't in the habit of getting out of other people's way, the whisper of contact between their arms as Peter passed by was enough to make the other man look down as if expecting to find an insect had landed on his skin. Seeing nothing, he kept walking, carrying on a comfortable silence with the little girl.

Without knowing he was going to do it, Claude followed.

Claude hadn't seen the boy wonder in person since the night they'd been shot at by Claude's former colleagues. Hit with a dart from a tranquilizer gun like some animal, Peter had managed to rescue his sorry ass by scooping him up and flying him to safety like some damsel in distress. As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, the boy had proceeded to act like being attacked together had solidified some sort of non-existent bond between them. Like they were on the same team simply because the kid had a habit of attracting the attention of dangerous people with guns. Not bloody likely. Feeling betrayed, Claude had stormed off, determined that New York could blow to hell for all he cared. He wasn't obligated to stick around and watch it happen.

Except he did stick around and he did watch it happen. Not like he had brought popcorn or champagne or anything. Not even cheap champagne. But he had stood on a rooftop in the middle of the city with no way of knowing if he would be safe from the explosion when it came. From there, he'd watched as a streak of light rose toward the sky before bursting outward like fireworks gone wrong. Watching it happen, Claude was struck by the enormity of his own failure. By the enormity of Peter Petrelli's failure. All that work and it had been for nothing, even if the city was still in one piece.

Claude didn't have a lot of trouble working out what had saved them all in the end. The story of Nathan Petrelli's brief disappearance and subsequent hospital stay was buried in the newspapers underneath wild speculations about the cause of the mysterious explosion over the city that night. No one seemed able to connect the two, which wasn't surprising. But it was Claude's guess that big brother had sprouted a conscience and had stepped in to save baby brother at the last second. A clever move, that. It explained why the explosion had appeared to be moving upward rather than down. It might even have been a noble sacrifice if only Nathan Petrelli had had the decency to die in the act.

But he didn't and fuck knew how that happened. Instead, he'd recovered and taken office as planned. Meanwhile, Peter had slipped back into the oblivion of relative anonymity. He'd all but disappeared.

Until now.

Now he was tying shoelaces for little girls in the middle of busy sidewalks like someone's sodding housewife. Claude didn't know what he'd been expecting to become of Peter in the wake of that explosion. Maybe a cape and a silly secret identity to go with that endless determination that he was meant to save the world--or destroy it. Maybe a one way trip to the insane asylum, courtesy his loving family. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing at all. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't this.

He followed Peter and the girl to a shit hole apartment building a few blocks from where he'd originally encountered them. Her hand still connected to Peter's, the girl walked a little ahead of her guardian as they bypassed the broken elevator in favor of walking up endless flights of stairs, Claude behind them the whole way.

"Here we are," the girl said unnecessarily as they stopped in front of a particular door. She smiled expectantly up at Peter as he fished around in his pockets for a set of keys. The way she looked at him he might have been a pony her parents had given her for Christmas. One she hadn't decided not to be afraid of yet.

Before Peter could sort through his keys, the door flew open and a dark-haired man appeared from behind it. Claude recognized him as Mohinder Suresh, the genetics professor Nathan Petrelli had brought with him to Peter's flat as back up the day Claude had decided to take the boy under his wing after all.

"Where were you?" Suresh asked, immediately bending down to take stock of the little girl as if searching for any damage that might have been done during her outing. The girl allowed the concerned examination without protest.

"Jesus, I left a note," Peter said, observing what would have been an obvious overreaction on the part of any parent but looked positively hysterical on the part of the seemingly unflappable geneticist. "We just went for a walk. Didn't we, Molly?"

Molly nodded, timid.

"That's not what your note said," Suresh said.

Peter looked inexplicably lost for a moment. Suresh seemed to be waiting for something as he watched the boy struggle.

"Peter?" he prompted when the boy didn't answer.

"We were going to feed the ducks at the park," Molly said, rescuing Peter. "Peter said his brother used to take him when he was little. Right?" She looked up at Peter, stopping just short of nudging him with her elbow.

"Uh, right," Peter said.

Suresh straightened from where he'd been crouched in front of Molly, crossing his arms over his chest. "So why didn't you go?" he asked.

"I guess we got a little sidetracked," Peter said, pushing his way into the flat as he spoke. Suresh moved aside, allowing him in. Claude managed to step through the door also just before it was shut.

"Sidetracked as in you thought of something else to do or sidetracked as in you forgot where you were going?" Suresh said, following Peter into the kitchen area where the boy began rattling away at various dishes for no apparent reason other than to make himself look busy.

"I didn't forget," Peter said a bit sullenly.

"Then why did you have to rely on Molly to prompt you just then?" Suresh pressed. "You knew you left a note but you had no idea what it even said!"

"I remembered I left a note, though, right?" Peter said, rounding on Suresh now, leaning against the counter behind him. "That's an improvement."

Suresh's lips were a thin line. "You took Molly with you," he said.

Peter sighed. "I needed her to remember how to get back," he said.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Suresh said. "What if she'd had an episode while you were out there? Did you ever think of that? You might not have known what to do, where to go."

"Christ, I haven't lost it completely, Mohinder," Peter snapped. "It's not like I've forgotten what hospitals are for or how to dial emergency."

Suresh sighed and Claude watched his shoulders sag as the fight finally drained out of him. "It's not good enough," he said. "I…worry."

"No kidding," Peter mumbled, turning the water on in the sink and beginning to idly rinse the dishes that had taken up residence there, scraping a little too long at the encrusted food. "I'm tired of people worrying."

Suresh was silent for a moment, watching Peter without seeming to see him at all. After a minute, Peter gave up, turning off the faucet. Flicking water off his hands into the sink, he dried them on the sides of his trousers before walking away, leaving Suresh standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, head hanging. Claude watched as Peter disappeared into a room at the back and shut the door behind him, not quite slamming it.

From where she'd been hovering on the periphery of the scene, Molly asked in a small voice, "Are you mad at Peter?"

"A little," Suresh admitted.

The girl moved a step closer. "Are you mad at me?"

Suresh looked down at her, smiling faintly. He reached out, resting a hand lightly on her shoulder. "No," he said. "It's just that…I know Peter is your friend, Molly. He's my friend too. But you shouldn't go anywhere alone with him. It isn't safe."

"I just don't want him to get lost," Molly replied, all childlike earnestness.

"Nor do I," Suresh said but there was something weary in his tone like maybe in his less noble moments that was exactly what he wanted. That Peter and whatever issue he was having this week would simply get lost and leave the two of them in peace.

"Do you think he'll ever remember?" the girl asked after a minute.

Doubt was written all over the good doctor's face so plainly the girl would have to be mentally deficient not to see it. Still, he managed to conjure a brittle smile as he said, "I hope so." And no matter how false that hope sounded, Claude could see how much they both wanted to believe that it was real.


	2. Chapter 2

**The Price of a Memory**

**Part 2/17**

Normally, Claude wasn't interested in using his ability for amateur surveillance purposes. Voyeurism, yes. Surveillance, well…three days spent in Suresh's flat unseen and he was ready to stab himself in the eye with a spoon out of sheer boredom. Little had he known when he'd started that the little tiff between Peter and Suresh would be the highlight of the whole operation, that most of his task would involve watching people try to ignore each other and sleep.

At least, Suresh slept. The little girl too if the silence coming from behind the closed bedroom door was any indication. But the most Peter could generally pull off was what Claude could only suppose was his best impression of what he thought a sleeping person should look and sound like. It might have been convincing enough to the untrained eye but from nights spent crashing in the boy's flat back in the days of their training sessions, Claude knew what Peter was like when he was asleep and this wasn't it. For one, Peter snored like a freight train. Windows rattled. Babies cried. That sort of thing. It was the kind of snoring that couldn't be stopped by turning him onto his side or his back. Throwing objects at him from across the room never had an effect either, no matter the size of the object or the force with which it was thrown. Maybe it was possible for Peter to sleep quietly, as he was pretending to do now on top of the air mattress that had been set up for him in the corner, but if he did, it wasn't the kind of sleep that made any difference in the morning.

Point being, when the crack of dawn finally came around and Peter stirred without any evidence of the usual transitional stages between sleep and wakefulness, Claude was ready for it.

With more stealth than Claude ever would have thought to give him credit for, Peter managed not to wake Suresh where he slept on the couch as he crept about the place, dressing and scribbling a cryptic note reading "Coffee" before slipping out the door.

As Claude followed Peter down the sidewalk, he reflected on what he'd managed to learn about the boy's situation so far, which was easy because it basically amounted to nothing. Turned out that somewhere in the months since Claude had seen him last Peter had given up that irritating habit he'd always had of filling every sodding second with essentially useless verbal outpourings and instead developed a tolerance for long, sustained silences. His newfound taciturnity might have been welcome enough under different circumstances. Now it was just damn inconvenient as it meant that what little information Claude had been able to gather came almost exclusively from that first argument between Peter and Suresh.

What had become clear was that Peter wasn't merely offering his services to Suresh as some kind of part-time nanny to an overprotective parent figure. At any rate, it wasn't like Peter went home at the end of the day. Instead, he seemed to actually be living with the geneticist. Separate beds would have been clue enough that they weren't having sex despite Claude's initial suspicions but then there was the way Suresh acted like some kind of self-appointed caretaker to Peter. There was no wiping of asses, but the man did have a tendency to hover, always watching Peter out of the corner of his eye like he couldn't be trusted with sharp objects. That was strange enough in itself but then there was the fact that the girl did it too sometimes. If Peter noticed, he showed surprising restraint by not saying anything. For his part, it drove Claude insane.

Eventually, Peter came to a small corner coffee shop about two blocks away from Suresh's building. This early, the place was just opening but apparently Peter was worth unlocking the door for a bit early to the two women working inside.

"Morning, Peter," the younger of the two women said in greeting as she stepped aside to let him in.

"Kind of early today, aren't you?" the heavier, older woman asked from where she'd been taking chairs down off the tables. "Where's your cute friend? The one from Iraq or wherever." The question wasn't subtle. It wasn't meant to be.

"India," Peter corrected automatically. "Actually, I thought I'd let Mohinder sleep in this morning. You know, get out of his hair for a while." Then, because even he was not an idiot of such epic proportions that he didn't know what the woman had meant by asking, he added, "I left him a note. He'll know where I am."

"If you say so," the woman said as she finished with the chairs. She winked at Peter, not exactly lecherous but definitely a bit condescending.

The younger woman--a mousy thing with thin brown hair loosely pulled back to better show off her inhumanly cheerful early morning smile--stood waiting by the register behind the counter, hands already poised over the buttons. "The usual, right?" she asked.

That was when it happened. Claude saw it clearly, even from the distance at which he was standing. Peter's expression, which had been one of polite, friendly openness since he'd entered the shop, suddenly melted into a blank puddle of confusion as if the girl had just asked him his opinion on the finer points of quantum theory rather than a simple question about his breakfast food preferences. For a moment, he blinked at her helplessly, flailing like an actor forgetting his lines on opening night.

The girl waited longer than was really necessary before she threw him a line. "Coffee," she said, pushing the corresponding button on the register as she spoke. "Danish. Newspaper."

"Oh, right," Peter said, digging through his pockets and opening his wallet. Rather than cash, he handed her what looked like a debit card. Trust fund still in tact, then. "Thanks, Tracey," he added as the girl arranged his order for him and handed him his change.

"No problem," she said, watching with ill-concealed concern as Peter took his food and made his way over to a table by the window, his back to the rest of the shop.

The older woman came up to Tracey, her back slightly to Peter and her lips barely moving as she said, "That was a little mean, don't you think?"

"What was?" Tracey said innocently.

"I thought he usually got a bagel…not a danish," the older woman said.

Tracey lifted her shoulders, staring down at the keys on her register. "I just wanted to see if he'd notice," she said.

"Should we call Dr. Suresh, do you think?"

They watched for a moment as Peter, sitting at his table, separated out the sections of the morning newspaper before piling them up in the order in which he planned to read them. The way they were looking at him, this might have been a particularly disturbing manifestation of a terrible mental disorder but Claude had seen the boy do this before and while he wasn't about to deny that it was a freakishly anal habit, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary either.

Tracey lifted her shoulders. "He seems okay today," she said. "Aside from the not remembering what to order." She bit her lip, as if trying to convince herself. "Anyway, Peter said he left a note this time." Mostly she just sounded like she didn't want to deal with Peter's keeper this early in the morning.

"Yeah, and for all we know the note could say he up and left for Albuquerque or Xanadu," the older woman said, rolling her eyes. "Just keep in mind if Dr. Suresh comes storming in here in the middle of the afternoon like he did that first day, I'm not going to be the one who calls him off this time. All right?"

"Whatever, Meg," Tracey said, waving off her co-worker.

"Peter is a sweetheart," Meg mused, "but I'd feel better if he wasn't out wandering the streets by himself like this."

Before they had a chance to continue their conversation, another customer came up to the counter and the two women moved to their separate corners, ready to do their work. Meanwhile, Claude debated his options. He didn't fancy sitting around watching Peter read his newspaper all morning but the potential entertainment value of Suresh causing a scene when he found out where his errant flat mate had gone was too much to pass up. He settled himself at the table next to Peter, facing him as he went about what was obviously a familiar morning routine.

Claude would not have thought it possible, but it turned out that Peter was even slower at reading the morning paper than Claude remembered. The glacial pace at which he worked his way through the various articles seemed a bit unnecessary to Claude, who had always believed that no one actually read whole articles all the way to the end before they lost interest and moved on to the next headline. But Peter seemed unusually determined to absorb each piece of information as he read it, running the tips of his fingers along the lines of each paragraph, combing over certain articles several times, occasionally even stopping in the middle and starting over again as if afraid he might have missed something important. The whole thing reminded Claude of that Greek character, the one who was condemned to roll a stone up a hill only to have it roll down on him again before he could reach the top. No wonder his mind started to wander after a while.

"Can I help you with something?"

Invisible as he believed himself to be, Claude could hardly be blamed for assuming the polite query was directed at someone else. However, when he came back to himself enough to move his gaze from the finger Peter had been dragging across the page as he read to the boy's face, he noticed that it wasn't the day's headlines the boy was staring at anymore. Instead, Peter was looking at him. Straight at him. Not through him or off to the side of him but actually seeing him where he sat at the next table, caught staring like some pervert.

_Nobody sees me._ He had a sudden flash of himself roaring this at Peter the first time they'd met, throwing him against a wall in the middle of the street. Back then, Peter had approached him out of some misplaced sense of morality, having witnessed Claude picking the pockets of unsuspecting strangers for personal gain and wanting to stop him. If Peter had seen underneath the veil of invisibility back then, it was because he was too daft to realize his abilities were causing him to pick up on Claude's own powers. This time it was merely a slip in his disguise caused by the idleness of watching someone read a newspaper for hours on end. It didn't happen often and it hadn't happened in a long time, but it was happening now and Claude struggled to think of a response, preferably one that included a clever variation on the phrase "I meant to do that."

Meanwhile, Peter was still staring at him from over the top of the Arts and Leisure section. His expression was increasingly uncertain.

"Are you okay?" he asked slowly as if Claude might not understand.

Claude's voice became a high-pitched mockery of what Peter might have sounded like if he were an actual girl rather than a theoretical one. "Am I okay, he says. 'Can I help you with something.' I'm hurt, honestly."

Any response Peter might have had was brought up short as Claude slid from the chair at his own table to the free one at Peter's. Thoughtfully, Claude picked up the untouched pastry sitting on Peter's plate and took a large bite out of it before remembering exactly how much he hated cheese-filled breakfast goods. He chewed with effort.

Mouth full, he asked, "Is that really how you greet an old friend?"

However lacking Peter was in essential areas like common sense and planning skills, Claude had found in the past that the boy had a certain knack when it came to formulating vaguely amusing comebacks in the midst of verbal sparring. He wasn't quite the artist Claude like to think of himself as, but he was pretty good, even when taken by surprise. But today that talent seemed to have deserted him completely as he searched for a response. At first, Claude thought this was merely a delay caused by being unexpectedly accosted in public. But slowly he came to see that there was more to it than that. That Peter wasn't simply choosing his words but that he had descended into a confusion not unlike the blankness that had come over him when the girl had tried to take his order.

The boy, Claude realized, was seeing him, that much was true. He was seeing him but there was no recognition in that gaze. Peter had no idea who he was.

The bottom of his belly dropped out from under him and suddenly the aftertaste of the pastry became like thick vomit in his mouth.

"Sorry, mate," he said lamely before Peter could speak. "Thought you were someone else."

With that, he rose from the table, leaving behind an utterly speechless young man. He waited until he was outside to do his usual disappearing act.

His first thought was that he should leave. Remove himself from the situation entirely before he became too deeply involved as he had once before. Back then had been different, he told himself as he made his way along the sidewalk with his usual disregard for the safety of others. Back then it had been about moral obligations. Jaded as he'd become, even he couldn't have continued his life of invisible vagrancy knowing the city was going to be blown to hell by some kid who couldn't control his powers. No such obligation existed now. Lives were not at stake simply because Peter Petrelli couldn't remember that he preferred bagels to danishes. The world was not going to end because the boy had looked in the face of an old quasi-ally and seen a stranger.

Better to just walk away. Better to return to his regularly scheduled program and forget entirely about the brief interruption of the past few days. Yes, that was what he would do.

Except instead of doing that he was climbing the stairs up to Suresh's flat. There, he pounded on the door with his closed fist without pause until Suresh answered. The other man had no time to react before Claude had him by the collar of his shirt and was throwing him against the wall across the corridor, keeping him there with fingers wrapped around his neck.

"What did you do to him?" Claude growled, only just remembering to shed the cloak of invisibility as Suresh flailed and choked. Behind Claude, the little girl had started screaming.

"What did you do?" Claude repeated more forcefully, slamming Suresh against the wall once more for emphasis. "Tell me!"

"You're hurting him!" the girl cried.

She had a point. Suresh could hardly answer his questions if he couldn't breathe and for that reason only, Claude loosened his grip on the other man's throat and backed away a few steps. Molly immediately insinuated herself between the two of them, clutching Suresh's waist as he recovered himself with difficulty.

"What did you do?" Claude said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Suresh said in between gasps for air. Then, because being nearly choked to death had apparently done nothing to dissuade him from angering Claude unnecessarily, he added, "Furthermore, I have no idea who the hell you are."

"He's the man who's been watching Peter," the girl said. She peered up at Claude from where she'd half-hidden her face in Suresh's shirt. "Aren't you?"

Claude raised an eyebrow at Suresh. "That's just fucking scary," he said, pointing at Molly. Bending at the waist so he could better look her in the eye without losing the power to intimidate, he asked, "Is that what you do, then? You're like the freak girl with x-ray vision or something?"

She looked nothing less than offended by his assumption. "I kept hearing noises," she said. "Like footsteps. They were always around Peter."

"Fuck me," Claude mumbled.

"How long has this been going on?" Mohinder asked, eyeing Molly like she was going to get a good talking to later for not telling him this before now.

"A few days," Molly replied, shrinking a little. "Since the day you yelled at Peter for taking me to the park and then forgetting where we were going."

"Forgotten more than his subway lines, come to that," Claude muttered. "Which brings me back to my original question--"

"I didn't do anything," Suresh replied. "And even if I did, who are you to be asking me besides some strange man who's been invisibly stalking us for the past several days?"

Claude considered making something up. In the years since he'd gone more or less permanently undercover, there had been times when he'd surfaced long enough to interact with basically inconsequential people to whom he never gave his most commonly used name out of fear that the likes of Bennet or Thompson might still be looking for him. He thought of referencing one of those personas now but, in the end, had no desire to add to the confusion, which was already vastly out of proportion with his usual tolerance for such things.

"Name's Claude," he said. "I knew Peter back in the days when he was trying not to blow up the city." He sighed in mock nostalgia. "Yeah, me and Peter were great mates back in the day. Funny thing, I just saw him down to the coffee shop and he didn't seem to know who I was. Care to explain that, Dr. Suresh?"

Suresh hesitated. "I can't explain here," he said, sounding as if he didn't really want to explain at all but was finally beginning to understand that he wasn't being given a choice. "If you really want to know what's happened to Peter, perhaps you better come inside."

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 3/17**

"This place is a real shit hole, isn't it?" Claude remarked as he wandered through Suresh's flat. Five minutes he'd been there and already he'd managed to skid across the floor on no less than three stray crayons and was nearly sent sprawling by a leaning stack of textbooks by Suresh's desk. He couldn't think how he'd managed to avoid such death traps in the few days he'd spent lurking about the place, but he was convinced they were out to get him now he was an invited guest rather than an invisible intruder.

"You've been dying to say that for days, haven't you?" Suresh replied, clearing his blanket and pillow from the couch where he'd been sleeping earlier. "Perhaps it would be safer if you sat down."

"Thanks anyway," Claude said, stuffing his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. "But you haven't invited me here for some bloody tea party. I prefer to stand."

"Fine," Suresh said, resigned. He seated himself on the edge of a battered armchair, hands dangling between his legs as he watched Claude pace back and forth, clearing a path for himself across the hazardous space.

"He's not been here long, has he?" Claude said, the thought occurring to him only as he voiced it aloud. Having had time now to become well-acquainted with the disaster area that was Suresh's flat, he began to see how liberally the messes that belonged to Suresh and Molly were strewn across the small living space, from the toys on the floor to the papers on the desk. These were two people who had had time to adjust to living together and become used to one another. But the evidence of Peter's existence was confined mostly to that one corner with the air mattress. He'd been there long enough that he didn't feel the need to neatly fold his clothes like some guest but he hadn't gotten comfortable enough that he wasn't about to leave things just lying around either.

"About six weeks," Suresh said. "Before that he was staying with his brother."

Claude's brow knit at that. "Not at his own place?"

"No," Suresh said. "From what I understand, Peter needed time to recover after the bomb. And with his memory the way it is, Nathan felt it wasn't safe for him to live on his own anymore." The mention of Nathan Petrelli's name brought the phantom taste of bile to Claude's mouth. "What might have been done with Peter's apartment, I'm not sure."

Claude felt an unexpected pang of regret at that. Not that his memories of the place were exactly fond, but he had somewhat grudgingly admired Peter's ability to stake out a territory of his own despite his family's sometimes overbearing influence. That flat had been his, crappy posters and all. It had been the one place they couldn't touch him and now, seemingly, it was gone.

"I see," Claude said. "So his memory loss came before he showed up here?" If nothing else, it threw a wrench in his theory that Suresh had somehow manufactured Peter's condition.

"He came to me more or less as you see him now," Suresh said. His expression became thoughtful. "You say he didn't know you when he first saw you at the coffee shop. He didn't know me either, the first time he came here. At least, he didn't know that we'd met before."

"He still doesn't," Claude guessed.

Suresh's jaw tightened. "No," he said.

"Why not?" Claude asked.

"At first, I was too shocked to tell him the truth," Suresh said. "And then Nathan Petrelli asked me not to."

"Figures," Claude said.

"You see, Peter's purpose in seeking me out this time around was very similar to when he came to see me the first time," Suresh said. "He'd found my father's book and was eager to share with me this extraordinary news he had--proof that the theories contained in the book were true." He sighed. "After a week or two, Nathan found out Peter had been coming here, that he'd come to trust me. His increasing preoccupation with his political career made it difficult for him to keep an eye on Peter and so he asked me to temporarily take over the responsibility under the guise of harmlessly entertaining Peter's interest in my father's work. The understanding, of course, was that I would interfere as little as possible with Peter's apparent memory loss."

"Sod that," Claude said.

Suresh smiled wryly. "Exactly," he replied.

Claude stilled, squaring himself in front of Suresh. "So? What've you found?"

Suresh sighed, looking down at his hands. "Not as much as I would like," he said. "To be honest, it's been a bit difficult getting enough information from Peter to make any real determinations. Besides that, I'm not a physician or a psychiatrist. While I've been able to collect a certain amount of data on Peter's condition, I've no idea what to do with what I know."

"Yeah, but what is it that you know?" Claude pressed.

Suresh sat back in his chair, a musing look on his face. "I know that he has lapses," Suresh said. "That I can be in the middle of a conversation with him and he'll forget my name. That he'll be on his way somewhere and suddenly forget his destination. That he can't read books anymore because he loses track of the story too easily." He nodded toward a small pile of paperbacks in Peter's designated corner. "I also know that he's aware that he has these lapses and that he's learned ways of trying to hide them. Mostly, he relies on cues from other people."

"Like when little Molly over there had to fill in the blanks for him about their trip to the park the other day," Claude said, nodding toward the bedroom where Molly was surreptitiously watching them through a crack in the door.

"Yes," Suresh said. "Of course, the lapses in his short term memory are only part of the problem. There's also the amnesia."

"You mean the not remembering me and you thing."

"Right," Suresh said. "The good news is that Peter hasn't lost himself completely. He knows who he is and where he came from. His childhood memories are as intact as they would be for the average person. But for some reason the past six to nine months has disappeared on him completely."

"Six to nine months," Claude said. "That's when he started figuring out about his powers."

Suresh nodded solemnly.

"Fucking hell," Claude murmured. "So he has no idea--"

"None whatsoever," Suresh said.

Claude felt his chest tighten as he fought to absorb this. "But you said he sought you out," he said, mind racing. "That he had some news that related to your research. Wasn't he talking about himself?"

Suresh shook his head. "He came to see me because, for whatever reason, he was beginning to suspect Nathan's abilities," he said. "He appears to have no idea about himself."

"And you haven't thought to tell him," Claude said acidly.

Suresh sighed. "Another stipulation of Nathan Petrelli's," he said. "But one I'm not in total disagreement with given how little I know about Peter's condition. I certainly wouldn't want to risk more harm to him by revealing information he's obviously not ready to hear." He sat forward again. "That is to say, if he came to the information on his own, I wouldn't lie to him. But until I know more about what caused him to forget in the first place--"

"You must have some theory," Claude said. "I mean, isn't that what you do? Form theories?"

Suresh gave him a withering look. "My best guess is that it happened during the explosion," Suresh said. "It's possible he suffered some form of brain injury that night that's affected his memory. Something that, for whatever reason, can't heal itself or didn't heal properly."

"Sounds promising," Claude said sarcastically.

"It's a little grim, I know," Suresh said. "But if it makes you feel better, I don't believe that Peter's lost his powers entirely. That, whatever injury he might have sustained that may have caused him to forget, his abilities are now merely dormant rather than absent."

"What makes you think so?"

"He's let me run a few tests on him," Suresh said. "I told him I needed the information I gathered as a reference for how the gene for special abilities manifested itself in families. Of course, I have nothing to compare it to given that I never had the opportunity to run tests on him before but what I found was unusual enough that I believe he still carries with him the abilities he absorbed before the bomb. Perhaps even a few new ones he's not aware of from people he's come into contact with since then."

"You mean Molly," Claude said.

Suresh nodded.

"What's it she does, then?"

"She finds people," Suresh said. "A man called Thompson was using her as a tracking system."

Claude shuddered at the mention of another of his old colleagues. "And these episodes she has?" he asked.

"They're related to her powers. She becomes ill from time to time and can't access her ability," Suresh said. "When this happens, a blood transfusion--specifically, from me--usually helps but I've yet to find a cure."

"Fuck me," Claude mumbled. "It's like the island of misfit toys over here, isn't it?"

Suresh smiled grimly. "At least I've found a way to help Molly for the time being," he said. "With Peter…There's just nothing. He'll either remember or he won't. He'll either go out one day and know to come back or he won't. He'll either rediscover his abilities on his own or…"

"Or I could teach him," Claude said.

Suresh looked up at him. "Sorry?" he said.

"I could teach him," Claude repeated. "He came to me once before. He'd been having those dreams about blowing up the city and he thought I was supposed to help him learn to control his powers so he wouldn't explode."

Suresh arched an eyebrow. "Oh really?" he said. "And how did that turn out?"

Claude bristled. "In fact, it turned out reasonably well, thank you very much," he said. "I first met the boy and he couldn't hardly float two feet off the ground or steal a lady's handbag without getting caught. By the time I was done with him, he flew my sorry unconscious ass halfway across the city after we were attacked by…some unexpected guests."

"And what then?" Suresh prompted, sounding like he already knew the answer.

Claude toed the ground. "We parted ways a bit prematurely," he admitted. At Suresh's knowing look, he became defensive. "How was I to know he'd go gallivanting off, exposing himself to radioactive people?" He paused. "Actually, come to think of it, that's the first thing I should have thought of when I left him, idiot that he is. No sense of irony, that one."

Suresh only looked at him.

"City's still here, isn't it?"

"Yes, thanks to Nathan Petrelli of all people," Suresh said, nearly choking on the words.

"My hero," Claude said, rolling his eyes.

A pause.

"Tell me, why are you so interested in helping Peter?" Suresh asked.

Claude shrugged. "Atonement for past sins isn't a good enough reason?"

"It is a good reason," Suresh said. "It's just not a convincing one."

"Maybe I just think the boy's got a right to know," Claude said.

"And what will it to do him if he does know?" Suresh said. "You've seen how he is now. He has trouble remembering where he is half the time. Pressuring him into remembering his abilities…it might be too much."

Claude looked down at his shoes. "At least let me spend some time with him," he said. "Let me see for myself what he's like and then I can determine if it's safe for him to know or not." He lifted his shoulders. "It's not like you can watch him twenty-four hours a day."

Suresh's lips twitched and he seemed dangerously close to laughing. "I'm sorry, are you offering to baby-sit Peter for me?"

"In a sense," Claude said, annoyed. "The boy needs a minder, doesn't he? You said so yourself. Hell, I won't even throw him over the side of anymore buildings if you don't want me to. Though I can't promise I won't…nudge him a bit."

Suresh sighed.

"Listen, I don't know if having me around will actually trigger anything in the way of memories," Claude said. "But what I do know is that what you have are theories and textbooks. What I have is experience."

Suresh pressed his lips together. "If I let you do this," he said carefully, "it will only be under one condition."

"What's that?" Claude asked, immediately on guard.

"He can't know the two of you knew each other before," he said.

"Sod that," Claude said, emphasizing each syllable.

"I'm serious," Suresh said. "If Nathan Petrelli gets so much as a hint of what's going on, he'll pull Peter out of here and neither of us will ever see him again. Think about it."

"Fucking Petrelli," Claude said.

"Take it or leave it," Suresh said.

Before Claude had a chance to reply, there was the scraping of feet in the hallway and the jangle of keys in the door. Peter was back. Claude exchanged looks with Suresh. It looked like they didn't have much of a choice now.


	4. Chapter 4

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 4/17**

Finding the right door in a building of doors that all looked the same to him was pretty much trial and error for Peter, even on his best days. It all came down to which lock his key fit into and he usually had to try a few before he found the right one. By now, the other tenants in the building were used to him and, at Mohinder's request, had become reasonably tolerant of Peter's inability to find his own way home. Actually, some were more tolerant than others. The old lady in the floral nightgown he'd run into a few minutes ago hadn't exactly offered him cookies and lemonade but she had written down Mohinder's apartment number on a sticky note for him before sending him on his way. With this in hand and his key in the lock, he should have been confident that he had the right place. Except for one thing.

There were voices coming from inside the apartment. The voices weren't loud like people fighting about something but the pace of the words and the tension with which they were spoken indicated some kind of debate. After a minute, Peter decided that one of the voices definitely belonged to Mohinder, which was reassuring. Less reassuring was the fact that he couldn't place the second voice, which was gruff and loud. Anxiously, he tried to think if there had been another person in the apartment when he'd left that morning. A guest he might have forgotten. He didn't usually block people out like that but once when his mother had come to stay with them at Nathan's house, he'd kept forgetting she was there. So it wasn't like it couldn't happen. It would just mean that he'd have to stand there and fake it for a few minutes until he either remembered the person or was caught in his lie. Neither prospect was particularly inviting.

Taking a deep breath, Peter opened the apartment door and stepped inside to find Mohinder sitting in one of the armchairs, a second man looming almost guiltily across the room from him. The door to Molly's room was open a crack and he could see her peeking out of it. Everyone seemed frozen in place and for a minute Peter thought maybe he'd walked into some kind of bizarre hostage situation. But then Mohinder stood, ready to greet him as he walked in.

"What's going on?" Peter asked.

"Peter Petrelli," Mohinder said in an awkwardly formal tone, "I'd like you to meet Claude. Claude, this is Peter."

"'Lo," the stranger said, fixing a narrow, blue-eyed gaze on Peter.

Peter stared back openly, taking in the somewhat haggard appearance of this new person, something niggling in the back of his mind all the while. Graying hair and shaggy beard, clothes that looked like they'd been fished out of a box someone had left on the curb…Peter had learned not to force these little sparks of recognition, knowing that they generally led him nowhere. But this time he couldn't let it go and finally it came to him.

"You're the crazy guy from the coffee place this morning."

Mohinder tittered uncomfortably.

Claude arched an eyebrow. "Funny," he said. "I was about to say the same thing about you."

"What are you doing here?" Peter asked slowly.

"Claude is interested in my father's work," Mohinder said, stepping in quickly. "He had heard my name and found my address but didn't know what I looked like. When he approached you at the café this morning, he thought you were me."

"Oh," Peter said, thinking how unlikely it sounded that someone as un-Indian as him could ever be mistaken for someone named Mohinder Suresh. But the significance of Mohinder's tone, which seemed to suggest that Claude's interest in the subject was more than that of another genetics professor, distracted him from pressing the issue. He cleared his throat. "It's invisibility. Isn't it?"

Claude's eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. "Sorry?" he said.

"Your power," Peter replied. "You…turn invisible."

"What makes you say that?" Claude asked, adopting a guarded expression.

Peter shifted, realizing suddenly that he shouldn't have said anything. For all he knew, Claude was here because he wanted Mohinder to cure him. Maybe he was ashamed of what he could do, the same way Nathan was.

But Claude seemed to be waiting for him to go on, so he managed to mumble, "The way you were looking at me this morning." He remembered looking up from his paper and seeing Claude there at the table next to him, watching what he was doing. And not just in that idle sort of way that sometimes happened in public places when two strangers found themselves in each other's eye line. Claude had been actively looking at him, studying him. Peter bit his lip. "You were staring at me like you thought I couldn't see you."

"Ah," Claude said, seeming somehow disappointed at this. "Aye. Invisible man. That's me."

"Sorry," Peter said. "I shouldn't have--"

But Claude cut him off. "What's it you do, then?"

Over Claude's shoulder, Mohinder's eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

"I have a brother who can fly," Peter answered. "I think."

"Good for him," Claude said. Blue eyes penetrated his. "But what's it _you_ do?"

For a minute, Peter didn't know what to say. He'd asked Mohinder one time whether the genetics that had determined Nathan's power could also mean that he had some hidden ability of his own. One he didn't know about yet. Mohinder had answered with what sounded like tactful evasiveness, saying something like it was always a possibility but that only time would tell. The implication being that he shouldn't get his hopes up. Peter had been disappointed but also strangely relieved.

Still, all he could do in answer to Claude's question was smile wryly and say, "I forget things. That's what I do."

"Doesn't sound like a very useful power to me," Claude replied.

Peter lifted his shoulders. "Well, I can't sneak into locker rooms and peek at naked people," he said, "but it might come in handy if I ever have to pass a lie detector test. Can't lie if I don't remember."

"I'm offended you think I'd use my powers for such perverted nonsense as spying on naked people," Claude said, affecting a mockingly prim tone.

Peter gave him a skeptical look. "Then what do you use it for? Other than sneaking up on people in coffee places."

"Wouldn't you like to know," Claude said, eyes narrowing in suspicion as if Peter was trying to extract government secrets from him. "Maybe if you're lucky I'll show you sometime. Seems I'm going to be hanging around a bit. Letting Suresh here study me and all that. Isn't that right?" He threw Mohinder a glance over his shoulder.

Mohinder seemed startled to have been invited back into the conversation after having been excluded for the past couple of minutes. Recovering smoothly, he nodded, saying, "I'll have to do some tests, of course."

Claude seemed to pale slightly. "What kind of tests?"

"Well, a blood test for one."

Claude frowned. "You didn't say anything about a blood test."

"Didn't I?" Mohinder said a little too innocently. "I'll need a sample to begin testing on. In fact, I have some equipment in the bedroom. If you like, we can start right now."

Claude gave Mohinder a strained smile. "Oh, aye. Let's. And while we're at it why don't we think up more lines that would sound at home in a bad porno? I mean, 'equipment in the bedroom'? Are you joking?"

Mohinder rolled his eyes and gestured for Claude to follow him. Molly came running from the bedroom as soon as the two men disappeared inside, shutting the door behind them once she was out. She was quick to join Peter where he'd seated himself on the couch, sitting close. Her feet didn't touch the floor and she kicked her heels against the cushions as they listened to the murmuring voices coming from inside the bedroom, unable to make out the words.

"He's scary," Molly said after a minute.

"Who is?" Peter asked. Not because he'd forgotten but because there were any number of people she could be talking about.

"The invisible man," she replied. She looked up at him with wide eyes. "Does he scare you?"

Peter shrugged. "I don't think there's anything to be scared of," he said, not exactly sure what evidence he had to support that particular theory. Then again, the worst thing Claude had done to him so far was steal a cheese danish off his plate, so it wasn't like he had any reason not to believe what he said.

Molly nodded, taking his opinion into careful consideration before discarding it. Peter couldn't exactly blame her for being nervous around strangers, knowing what Mohinder had told him about the brutal murder of her parents at the hands of Sylar. He put an arm around her, squeezing her reassuringly against his side. She giggled.

"You were gone a long time this morning," she said.

"I was?" Peter asked.

She nodded. "Is it because you're mad at Mohinder?"

"No," Peter said. "Why? Was Mohinder mad that I left?"

"He said your note was too short," Molly replied.

"I thought it was concise," Peter said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means it was short."

"Oh," Molly said. She shifted. "Did you get a newspaper?"

"Yup," he said, feeling a slight twinge of annoyance that everyone else seemed to know so much more about his habits and routines than he did. First the girl at the counter--handing him his "usual" order without him being able to remember what it was--now this.

"Did you cross off the articles so you'd know which ones you'd read?" she asked. "Like we did the other day when I was helping you?"

She looked up at him hopefully.

"Of course," he said. He didn't have the heart to tell her the truth, which was that he'd forgotten all about the method she'd devised to help with the confusion that came when he tried to read a newspaper.

"You did it all by yourself?" she asked, beaming at him.

"All by myself," he reassured her, feeling like an asshole.

"That's good," she said.

"Yeah," he replied, wondering if there would ever be a time when his progress was measured against more lofty standards than these. "I guess it is."

TBC

_A big thanks to everyone for their kind reviews of the first few chapters! I hope you continue to enjoy!_


	5. Chapter 5

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 5/17**

If there was one thing Claude knew about Peter it was that the boy was utterly predictable and that memory loss had probably made him even more so. With that in mind, he bypassed Suresh's flat the next morning despite his promise to show up bright and early and went straight to the coffee shop where he knew he'd find Peter. Not only was he there, but he was sitting at the same table with the newspaper piled in front of him, the sections arranged in the same order as before. The only thing that was different was the untouched blueberry muffin at his elbow--no cheese danish or bagel today. Apparently Tracey had been up to her old tricks again.

Instead of approaching Peter right away, Claude lingered at the counter. The slightly petulant look of frustration on Peter's face as he worked his way through one of the longer articles at the front of the paper's political section was not unfamiliar after yesterday, but the way it wasn't hidden behind a curtain of hair hanging in his face was. Claude had come damn close to taking a pair of scissors to those maddening strands of hair on more than one occasion. But now they were gone, he almost missed them. The new, shorter cut stank of someone else's effort to make Peter look more presentable, more adult. Probably Nathan Petrelli had insisted on the change.

"Can I help you, sir?"

Claude looked around at the near echo of the same words Peter had used to get his attention the day before. This time they came from little Tracey, staring up at him from behind the counter. Seeing she had his attention, her eyes darted briefly to Peter and Claude knew she was wondering if he was some kind of pervert come to stalk or terrorize her favorite customer.

The demands of being visible for once were such that Claude couldn't bypass the "customers only" rule of sitting in a café and so he was obliged to fish around in his pockets for loose change with which to buy a cup of coffee. Of course, this being a fancy coffee shop rather than a roadside diner, Claude's choices were a little more complicated than "regular" or "decaf." As the girl reeled off to him his list of options, he could only stare at her blankly and repeat several times over, "Just coffee." Eventually, he was given what he wanted: a steaming mug of black, bitter liquid.

Carrying his beverage over to Peter's table, he hovered over the boy a minute, waiting to be noticed. As he did, he caught a glimpse of the article that had Peter so thoroughly flummoxed and caught sight of a headline about Congress and some decision they'd made the day before that may or may not adversely affect the good people of New York. Peter ran his finger across the lines of each paragraph, his lips moving silently with each word. Claude noticed that his teeth were slightly clenched and guessed that this was far from the first or even second time Peter had tried to read the thing, more than likely searching for references to his brother.

Suresh had told him that Peter was no longer capable of reading books because he had trouble keeping track of the plots. Apparently this problem extended to newspaper articles as well and while this one wasn't exactly short, Peter's inability to absorb the information he found there disturbed Claude in an unnamable way.

After a minute, Peter seemed to sense that he was being watched. He twisted around in his chair and looked up at Claude, a frown tugging at his lips. Claude had taken into consideration the possibility that Peter wouldn't know him right away and so waited with more patience than was his custom for the penny to drop. Finally, a flash of recognition lit the boy's face and he gave a crooked smile.

"The invisible man," he said, his voice hushed in case he was overheard by any of the shop's other patrons.

"The Forgetful Wonder," Claude replied, heedless of the volume of his own voice.

Peter pulled a face. "Is that the best you can do?" he asked and for a second it felt like the old days, trading barbs with an opponent who, Claude hated to admit, was maybe a little better armed in the wit department than he would have originally thought.

"Best I could do on short notice. It's not like I lay awake at night trying to think of these things," Claude said gruffly, sitting down uninvited in the seat across from Peter, who didn't protest. "Sorryif it doesn't quite match up to the imaginative achievement of your own effort."

"The invisible man? That's classic," Peter said. "The fact that your name is Claude just makes it funnier."

"Oh, aye. Adds that special bit of nuance," Claude said, rolling his eyes. "Anyway, when did you--" He stopped himself just in time.

"When did I what?" Peter asked.

"Nothing," Claude finished limply. He'd been about to ask when Peter had become so educated on the subject of old horror movies. Before, Peter had never caught on to the rather clever reference Claude had woven into his assumed name. But this new Peter had figured it out straight away. Faster than anybody ever had before, that was for certain.

"Does your arm still hurt?" Peter asked after a minute, nodding toward where Claude had started unconsciously rubbing at his own arm, looking to soothe the lingering soreness from where Suresh had taken his blood the day before.

That had been a dirty trick, the blood test. Not like he'd never done one before. After all, they didn't just let you walk in off the street and work for a secret government agency posing as a paper company, did they? But that had been part of a professional procedure. In comparison, Suresh was amateur hour and downright unsettling besides what with the little makeshift lab he'd set up in his own bedroom. It was Claude's guess that most of the equipment being kept there was for Molly's benefit, given her mysterious condition. But it still creeped him the hell out.

If he gave in at all it was only because Suresh had spent ten minutes boring him half to death with his self-important droning about how understanding more about Claude and his abilities might help them figure out a way to trigger Peter's memories down the line. He had a point, but that hadn't made Claude any happier about being taken advantage of in such a blatant and unexciting manner.

To Peter, all he could say was, "Bit sore is all."

"I bet," Peter said. "He's getting better at finding the veins, though. Molly used to hide because she hated the way he'd have to stick her three or four times before he found the right spot. I offered to help but he wouldn't let me do it myself, so I had to show him the right way."

"Medical training or drug addict?" Claude asked, though he already knew the answer.

"I went to school to be a nurse before…" He gestured to his head. "Anyway, Mohinder must have your test results today. That's what you're here for, right? Kind of exciting."

Claude gave Peter a bland look. "Not like a pregnancy test, mate," he said. "Don't need the stick to turn blue to tell me I can turn invisible, do I?"

"Hmm," Peter said musingly, making a show of studying Claude from across the table. "I don't know. I've never actually seen you do it."

"You bloody well have," Claude protested.

"When?" Peter challenged.

"Yesterday," Claude replied. "I was sitting next to you for hours before you saw me there. Looked right through me a couple of times, you did."

Peter considered this for a moment before shaking his head. "I'm not convinced," he said and it sounded more like a phrase he'd picked up from Suresh than one he might ever have used on his own.

Claude leaned across the table, nearly nose to nose with Peter now. To his credit, the boy didn't flinch back or away. "I could do it right now if I wanted to," he said.

The corner of Peter's lips climbed into a mischievous smile. "In front of everybody?" he said, eyeing the people that surrounded them. Claude looked with him and noticed that Tracey and now Meg were watching him and Peter from behind the counter looking like they were about two seconds away from phoning Suresh.

"Nah," he said, looking down into his cup of coffee, which had grown cold as they talked. "Wouldn't want to scare off your mates over there."

Peter glanced over his shoulder at the two women before turning back to Claude. "Oh, them," he said, his mood dampening at Claude's refusal.

"What do you say it like that for?" Claude asked.

"No reason," Peter said, tearing a few crumbs off the muffin but not eating it. "They're nice enough ladies but Mohinder asked them to keep an eye on me and sometimes they take it a little too seriously. Like, I wish I could turn invisible just so they would stop watching me all the time."

"That is one of the perks," Claude said.

Peter gave him a grim smile. "It's not like I don't appreciate their concern. I know they're just trying to help. Mohinder too. It just…gets annoying. Actually, the whole thing gets annoying. The fact that I even need help."

"You mean with the forgetting things?" Claude asked.

Peter nodded.

Claude began playing with the corner of one of the brown paper napkins he'd been handed at the counter. "How did it happen?" he asked. "Were you…in an accident or something?"

"Not that I know of," Peter said. "Actually, it was my brother who was in an accident. About nine or ten months ago. He was okay but his wife Heidi was paralyzed for a while."

"For a while?" Claude said. "I was not aware that being paralyzed after a horrific car accident was something you could be cured from."

"Neither was I," Peter said. "But I remember being in the hospital with Nathan when the doctors told him about it and I've seen pictures of her in a wheelchair. But she walks fine now. I don't know how. They don't talk about it." He sighed. "I definitely remember being told, though. It's one of the last things I remember before…"

"Before what?" Claude prompted.

"Before I woke up one day and I was almost a whole year older than I remembered being," Peter said. "My dad was dead, Nathan had been elected to Congress, Heidi could walk…" He stopped himself with effort, looking out the window now at his side rather than at Claude, gazing at the people passing by out on the sidewalk.

"And that's all you remember, is it? Waking up one day and it was all gone. Just like that."

Distracted, Peter shrugged loosely. "I guess," he said. "Those first days are kind of a blur. Mostly I remember feeling really tired all the time. And I felt…like I'd done something wrong. Like Nathan was upset with me for some reason."

Interesting.

"So you don't remember anything from the time in between? It's all just a blank, is that it?" Claude pressed, beginning to wonder how far Peter was going to let him push before shutting him out.

Peter nodded.

"You've no idea whatsoever what happened to you during that time."

"No," Peter said.

Claude let go of the napkin he'd begun shredding. "Tell me, did you not think to ask someone?"

Peter seemed mildly offended at this. "Who is there to ask?" he said. "The last thing I remember is graduating from nursing school. I made a few friends there but it's not like any of them stop by to say hello or anything so I'm kind of assuming that whatever happened, I lost touch with them. Maybe I made some new friends but none of them seem to be around either." He shook his head, lips pressed tight. "All that's left is Nathan and every time I try to ask him, he just feeds me some line about not forcing the memories."

Surprised by Peter's sudden vehemence, Claude let the silence settle between them. Whatever had happened, it seemed obvious no one had pushed Peter down a convenient flight of stairs and gotten lucky about which memories stayed and which ones fled. Suresh had told him Nathan Petrelli didn't want anybody prying into the source of Peter's memory loss. Was he just protecting him in his usual misguided way or was there something else to Petrelli's insistence that Peter not remember?

Deciding not to push the subject any further for the moment, Claude caught Peter's eye and nodded toward the sunny day outside the window. "What do you say you and I ditch Suresh for a bit and I give you that demonstration I promised on the perverted past times of invisible men?"

Peter's expression turned from sullen to mildly intrigued. "We're not going to murder anybody, are we?"

"Not today," Claude said. "That's the more advanced class."

Peter grinned. "Just making sure," he said.


	6. Chapter 6

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 6/17**

"Well?" Claude asked as they made their way back to Suresh's flat a few hours later. He was visible now, a modest wad of money tucked in the pocket of his coat. Peter shuffled along beside him, hands stuffed deeply in his own pockets, a pensive look on his face Claude didn't like one bit. He didn't look disappointed, exactly. But it was clear before he spoke that even if his memory had become so much Swiss cheese, that damn moral compass of his was still fully in tact.

"I guess I just thought there would be more…stealth involved," Peter said, choosing his words with obvious care. To Claude, he sounded like someone trying to comment on a play or movie he'd just seen without realizing how completely he'd missed the point of it all.

"Well," Claude said with no small amount of annoyance, "I'll have you know it takes years of practice to get good at what I just showed you."

"Oh, really?" Peter asked, amused.

"Aye, it does," Claude replied. "It's all about knowing who's going to make a good target and not caring if people think they're going barking mad because they're suddenly bumping into things they can't see."

"But picking people's pockets for money?" Peter asked. "I think I'd rather have seen you peeking at naked people."

"I find there's not much profit in spying like that other than a good wank here and there," Claude said. "The money part, well, I could say that's a matter of survival but really it's mostly just fun. Technically, I could steal food and the other necessities any time I wanted to."

"Or maybe get a job like a normal person," Peter said.

"Speak for yourself, mate," Claude said. "I don't see you going out and contributing to the gross national product or whatever it is on a daily basis. Putting all that good nursing school education you say you have to good use. Not like you've forgotten any of what you learned there."

"Maybe not," Peter said. "But I think knowing the procedures isn't all that important when you can't keep straight the people you're supposed to be performing them on."

"So what is it you do for money then?" Claude asked.

The boy hesitated before mumbling sheepishly, "Trust fund."

"I might have guessed," Claude said. Disgusted as he felt by this development, he might have gone into one of his old tirades about spoiled rich children but even as the words formed on his lips, he remembered this his goal this time around was not to scare Peter off but to earn his trust. Deciding to keep his criticisms to himself for the moment, he adjusted the subject slightly. "What about Suresh? What's he do for money? I can't imagine waiting for freaks like me to fly into his radar is a very lucrative business on its own and he has mouths to feed."

"He's been trying to get a job with one of the schools around here," Peter said.

"As what? A janitor?"

"As a professor," Peter said, rolling his eyes. "Also, I'm pretty sure my brother gives him money."

"What, like a nanny's fee?" Claude said, snorting.

"More like hush money," Peter said. "Mohinder's allowed to 'indulge my delusions' all he wants as long as he doesn't tell the press I have them in the first place."

"And he accepts this, does he?" Claude asked.

Peter lifted his shoulders, his hands still in his pockets. "Like you said, he has mouths to feed." He gave Claude a sideways look. "Anyway, at least we both had jobs at one point. What did you do before?"

"Me?" Claude said. "I worked for a paper company based in Texas. Primatech."

The boy at least had the courtesy to wait a few beats before he burst out laughing.

"What's so funny about that?" Claude asked, bristling.

"Nothing," Peter said, beginning to lean on Claude just a bit as he tried to catch his breath. "I just can't picture you behind a desk in some cubicle. Like with a Dilbert mug and sticky notes everywhere."

Claude arched an eyebrow. Peter's fit of laughter was beginning to draw attention.

"I don't know who or what Dilbert is but I get the feeling I should be insulted," Claude said.

"Just please don't tell me you were in customer service," Peter said.

"I was a sales representative," Claude said. The lies came easily enough, even years later. He wasn't even sure if he'd told the old Peter this much. "I traveled the country with my business partner."

Peter bit his lip to keep back anymore embarrassing displays of mirth. "Did you wear a suit?" he asked, eyeing the virtual rags Claude wore now.

Claude bristled. "So what if I did?" Then, because Peter had started chortling again, he added, "And I looked damn good in it too."

"I'm sure you did," Peter said, cheeks reddening slightly. "I just can't picture it."

These days, Claude had trouble picturing it himself. What a fool he'd been back then, thinking he was serving some greater good by turning his own in to those who meant them harm. True, he'd gotten smart in the end. But where had it all gotten him? He'd formulated his own agenda and had paid for it dearly, if not with his physical life then with any chance he'd had at leading any kind of a normal, productive existence. Reduced, he was.

But in a way, he and Peter had that in common. Against all odds, the boy walked and talked and breathed and bled but what chance did he really have of ever leading a normal life now he couldn't trust his own ability to remember simple things? Because maybe they could walk down the street side by side, shoulders brushing and witty banter and all just like they had back then, but one thing his afternoon with this new Peter had made clear was that the floppy-haired kid Peter had once been wasn't coming back. Even if he did manage to recover his memories, he'd never be the person he'd been before.

In shared silence, they arrived at Suresh's apartment building but weren't quick to go inside, fearful that their day of delinquency would produce an encore of the wrath Suresh had displayed a few days before when Peter had disappeared with Molly. Instead, they lingered outside on the sidewalk in what felt to Claude like a parody of those scenes in old movies when the two main characters arrive home from their first date and are trying to decide whether it would be the proper thing to kiss each other good night on the doorstep.

"It doesn't hurt, does it?" Peter asked suddenly, thankfully breaking into Claude's thoughts before he could take the comparison any further. "Turning invisible, I mean?"

"No," Claude said. He might have answered more sarcastically except for the serious concern he heard in the boy's voice. "Least, if it does, I've long since stopped noticing."

Peter nodded, absorbing this.

"Why? Did it look like it hurt?" He hated to think he was making funny faces without knowing it, passing in and out of visibility.

"No," Peter said, brow furrowing. "I don't know why I asked."

But Claude had a feeling he knew why Peter had asked, even if Peter himself didn't. Invisibility wasn't one of them, but Claude knew from his time with Primatech that some abilities could cause pain to the people who practiced them. Most times, the pain went away or was adapted to over time as the newness of the experience faded and the person became used to their powers. With empaths, this was less true if only because the newness of it all never really went away for them as they acquired power after power. The old Peter had known this well enough--or was starting to know it, the last time Claude had seen him. As for this new Peter, Claude supposed it wasn't entirely impossible that somewhere in that Teflon memory of his lay some buried recollection of glowing hands and explosions in the night sky.

"It was kind of cool, though," Peter added after a minute. "Watching you disappear like that."

"Thanks," Claude said. "I'll be sure to let my special effects department know you enjoy their work."

Peter smiled at this.

"Come on, then," Claude said. "Before you have to think of another way to flatter me just to stall for time."

Wordlessly, Peter followed Claude into the building. Together, they climbed the stairs to Suresh's floor. It didn't escape Claude's notice that Peter seemed to be hanging back behind him the whole way up, following rather than leading. It would have been easy to attribute this obvious hesitance to nervousness, heading for another lecture from Suresh just days after the last one. But then Claude began to realize that there was more to it than that. Peter wasn't just lagging behind. He was actually _following_ Claude as if he was a visitor new to the building rather than a resident there.

There was no time to comment on this before they reached Suresh's door--plain, dark thing that it was--where Peter sorted clumsily through his keys before leading the way inside. Rather than the frantic worry they'd been expecting, they were met with the anticlimax of a peaceful scene involving Suresh typing at his computer and Molly reading on the couch. Their arrival was barely noticed until Suresh looked up from his work, peering at them over the top of his glasses.

"Good, you're here," Suresh said, mostly to Claude as if he wasn't hours late for the appointment they'd set up the day before. He stood from his chair. "I wanted to discuss some of the results of that blood test with you. In private, if you don't mind."

Ah. So Suresh didn't want to fight in front of the children. Fair enough.

"Yeah, all right," Claude said, giving a last glance toward Peter before following Suresh into that strange little mini-laboratory of a bedroom at the back. Apparently the only private refuge in the whole place except the bathroom.

As soon as the door was closed behind them, Suresh rounded on him. "Well?" he said.

Claude hesitated. "Is that an irate 'where the hell have you been, I've been worried sick, what do you have to say for yourself' sort of 'well' or is it a 'what information have you managed to gather that I might also be interested in' sort of 'well'?" he asked, genuinely unsure.

Suresh considered. "The latter," he said. "For now."

"Ah," Claude said.

"I assume you've been with Peter this entire time," Suresh pressed.

"Aye, went on a little field trip, we did," Claude said. "Demonstrated my abilities for him, as promised."

"And?"

"And he mostly hid in the alley," Claude said.

"I see," Suresh said.

"Yeah," Claude said, a shade of disappointment entering his voice without his permission. It wasn't like he'd expected it to be as it had been the first time around--Peter naturally and unknowingly turning invisible with Claude just by virtue of standing next to him. But it would have been nice if the boy had had the courtesy to take a hint when it was being handed to him. Especially with Claude all but reenacting their former misadventures right in front of him.

"So? Now that you've spent more time with him, do you still believe Peter should be told about his powers?" Suresh asked.

Claude wandered over to the bureau, picking up a small necklace with a heart-shaped pendant and dangling it between his fingers as he thought how to respond to Suresh's question. Part of him wanted to answer with a resounding yes. Not because it was true, but because he still believed what he'd said the day before about Peter deserving to know. The other side him was beginning to see that things were more complicated than he'd originally thought.

"Does it seem at all odd to you?" Claude asked, setting the necklace down and looking up at Suresh, who was watching him closely. "The last thing he remembers before everything goes blank is the night of his brother's accident."

"So?" Suresh said.

"So," Claude said. "He told me once that was the night he started figuring out about his powers. Said something about knowing his brother was hurt before anyone ever called him to tell him what had happened." Claude lifted his shoulders. "Maybe he didn't start properly using his powers until months later, but that was when it started and that's the exact moment his memories disappear. That can't be a coincidence."

Suresh folded his arms. "I suppose it's possible that Peter's memory loss is more psychological than physical," he said. "The mind is a complicated thing. There's no telling how the explosion affected him."

"But what if it wasn't the explosion?" Claude said.

Suresh arched an eyebrow. "Are you suggesting Peter's memory loss might be…deliberate?" he asked. "Because pardon me for saying so, but it seems to me that it would take an extremely well-aimed brick to the head for someone to rearrange a person's memories as conveniently as that."

"I'm just saying there are some questions need asking," Claude said. "And from what Peter's told me, I have a feeling Nathan Petrelli is the one to ask."

"Nathan Petrelli is in Washington," Suresh said. "Though he does stop in every few weeks to check in on Peter."

"Good, because I don't fancy traveling all the way there just to see him," Claude said. "Maybe next time he comes for a visit, I can arrange a private chat of my own. See what I can get out of him."

"You really think he orchestrated some conspiracy to steal Peter's memories?" Suresh asked.

"I don't know what I think," Claude said. "But I'm sure as hell going to see what I can find out."

"And until then?"

Claude shrugged. "Got the boy's attention now, don't I?" he said.

Suresh nodded, conceding. A pause passed between them. Standing next to the door, Claude could hear Peter and Molly's murmuring voices as Peter recounted for her what sounded like a somewhat edited version of his afternoon activities with the invisible man.

"Don't suppose you found anything in those blood tests," Claude said. "Anything I need to know about. In case he asks me later."

"Oh, yes," Suresh said as if he'd only just remembered. "Didn't I tell you? Your blood is perfectly normal. Turns out the invisibility is all in your head."

Claude felt his lips twitch even as his eyes narrowed in annoyance. "Think you're funny, do you?"

Suresh grinned. "Not at all," he said. "Are we through here?"

"Actually, there's one more thing," Claude said. "It's about your door."

Suresh blinked. "My door?" he said.

"The door to your flat."

"What about it?"

"You need to decorate it," Claude said. "Hang one of Molly's drawings on it or make some kind of sign."

"But why?" Suresh asked, bemused.

"Because otherwise Peter can't recognize it," Claude said. "He followed me all the way up the stairs just now as if he didn't know where it was we were going. Like he'd never even been here before."

Suresh's face fell. "He used to do that a lot back when he first moved in with us," he said. "I thought he was getting better about it." He sighed harshly. "Damn."

Claude felt a pang of sympathy for Suresh in spite of himself.

"Aren't there drugs out there that would help him?" Claude asked. "For Alzheimer's patients or people who've been in accidents?"

"There are," Suresh said. "But Peter's not interested in seeing a doctor about his problems and since I can't prescribe medication and I'd rather you didn't steal it from unsuspecting elderly women and their families--"

Claude bristled.

"--we're stuck with what we have."

Claude sighed. "I just think a picture or something would make things easier for him," he said. "Make it more distinguishable."

"No, you're right," Suresh said grimly. "It's a good suggestion. I should have thought of it."

With that, they emerged from the bedroom to find Peter and Molly huddled together as expected. The two of them sat on the floor at the coffee table, Molly on her knees and Peter with his legs folded underneath him. Molly colored as they talked, Peter handing her crayons as she filled in the different colors in a picture she'd found in a coloring book.

"So when he goes invisible do his clothes go invisible too?" she was asking as she added the green to what looked like leaves on some sort of tree.

"Yeah, his clothes disappear too," Peter replied, glancing up at Claude as he and Suresh came back into the room with a smile that bordered on conspiratorial.

"Good," Molly said. "Because it would be weird if he had to be naked." She made a face. "But how do his clothes go invisible?"

"Magic," Claude answered before Peter could respond. He had little experience with children but he knew it was usually safe to assume that this answer would satisfy them, no matter the question.

But of course Molly would be the one child in the world who knew better.

"There's no such thing," she said matter-of-factly.

"What're you on about? Of course there is," Claude said. "See, these are magic clothes. They're made from special fabric that responds to signals in my brain so when I go invisible, the clothes turn invisible with me."

Molly looked to Peter, questioning. He winked at her and held out another crayon.

"If you say so," she said, shaking her head.

"Right," Claude said. "Anyway, I'm off for the day. Be back tomorrow."

"Bye," Molly said, not sounding particularly torn up about his imminent departure.

"See you in the morning," Peter said.

"Yeah," Claude said, hearing the implied invitation to meet Peter at the coffee shop again and trying very hard not to be too pleased about it. "See you then."

TBC

_Thanks so much to everyone who left such generous reviews of the previous chapters! I hope you continue to enjoy the story!_


	7. Chapter 7

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 7/17**

"You're getting very sleepy."

Peter fought back the urge to roll his eyes at Claude's theatrically ominous intonation as he obediently concentrated on the heart-shaped pendant being dangled in front of him. Behind the little blur of constant motion, he could make out Claude's face, staring intently as if he could get Peter to fall into a trance by sheer force of will. Molly sat beside him, mesmerized by Claude's game almost in spite of herself.

In the weeks that had gone by since Claude had first offered himself as a test subject for Mohinder, Molly hadn't exactly warmed up to the invisible man. But after last night, they'd spent the morning in desperate need of a distraction and Claude had offered it to them with his playful suggestion that they try to recover Peter's memories by hypnotizing him. So far, his strategy had worked. This was the brightest Peter had seen Molly look all day and even he was starting to feel the weight of the night lift from his shoulders.

Molly had been showing signs of an impending attack for days now. The listlessness, the loss of appetite, the nightmares. They'd known it was coming and had prepared for it as best as they could without scaring Molly in the process, but when Peter had woken from a nightmare of his own to find Mohinder shaking his shoulders and hissing that Molly was sick, he still felt completely unprepared. Caught up in the confusion of the moment, he'd first tried asserting his medical knowledge where he thought it would be useful but was soon unceremoniously exiled to standing next to the phone in case they needed to call an ambulance.

Peter wasn't stupid. He knew that being sent to stand next to the phone was the rough equivalent of being asked to boil water, a task reserved for someone who would only be in the way otherwise. But he'd stood there as Mohinder had asked him to, resentful and helpless. In the end, Molly had responded to the usual treatment and they'd managed to avoid any real disaster. But Mohinder had been in a deep state of self-flagellation ever since and with all of them tired and unsettled, things in the apartment had been tense.

Lost in thought, Peter didn't realize his attention had slipped until Claude reached around with one hand and slapped him on the side of the head.

"Pay attention, you," he said.

Peter sighed, shifting so that he sat up a little straighter. He raised an eyebrow at Claude. "If this works, you're not going to make me walk around and cluck like a chicken or something, are you?" he asked.

"Wouldn't think of such a thing," Claude replied in a tone that suggested that that was exactly what he'd been thinking. Or worse.

Molly giggled. "You're supposed to be getting sleepy, remember?" she reminded Peter.

"Oh, right," Peter said, shifting his gaze back to the pendant.

In reality, he was a little relieved that Molly seemed to know that this was all just a game. When they'd started, he'd been afraid that he was going to have to pretend for her sake that he'd fallen into some kind of trance, making up some harmless memory from his lost past just to satisfy her. But it was clear that she was expecting about as much out of this as Peter and Claude were and that she was simply enjoying the entertainment value of their familiar banter.

When exactly that banter had become so familiar, Peter couldn't say. Probably around the same time he'd stopped being surprised when Claude started meeting him at the coffee place every morning. It had been hard getting used that, seeing the stranger sitting at Peter's usual table by the window day after day, not sure if he was supposed to join him or find his own place to sit. But gradually the moments of blankness surrounding Claude had begun to fade. Peter recognized him more quickly now. There were still bad days but even then they didn't have to waste quite so many awkward minutes while Peter flailed about, trying to free the other man's name from the tip of his tongue.

And Claude never just told him, either. Not even a hint in the right direction. Instead, he would just sit there while Peter struggled, forcing him to come up with the information on his own. The same went for words Peter blanked out on or directions he couldn't quite give. At first, this seemed like unnecessary torture. Something Claude did for his own private amusement. In the past, when Peter had tripped like this, Nathan would impatiently supply him with the answer if only so the pace of the conversation could match the tightness of his schedule. Claude, on the other hand, pretty much had all day. Literally.

"Why do you do that?" Peter had asked once as they walked along the sidewalk, Claude invisibly overturning trash cans for no apparent reason. "You knew what I meant."

"Of course _I _knew what you meant," Claude said as if his superior intellect was merely a given in this situation. "But I also knew that _you_ knew what you meant. I was just waiting for you to figure it out. That's all."

When Claude wasn't challenging Peter's memory, they were usually talking about Claude's powers, a topic he was surprisingly open about considering how close-mouthed he was about everything else. Peter was allowed to ask anything he wanted about the exact mechanics of going invisible, but the things he was really curious about were strictly off limits. As a result, he knew nothing about Claude's former life. How he'd discovered his abilities in the first place. How he'd gone from a (presumably) respectable life as a paper salesman to what he was now. Where he lived. What he'd been doing before he decided to search out Mohinder. That kind of stuff required a level of clearance Peter had yet to gain with the invisible man, who remained a deep mystery to him despite their daily interactions.

"Wrist is getting tired, mate." Claude's voice cut into Peter's thoughts once again. "Are you getting sleep yet or not?"

"I'm getting seasick," Peter said. "Does that count?"

"Try breathing more deeply," Mohinder suggested from where he was sitting in the battered armchair where he'd kept himself more or less removed from the proceedings up to this point.

"Also, let your eyelids get heavy," Claude added, seeming to resent Mohinder's intrusion on their fun.

Once again barely suppressing the urge to roll his eyes, Peter did as he was told. Watching the pendant swing back and forth, he began to think of the nightmare he'd had the night before. It wasn't often that he slept deeply enough to dream anymore, but when he did it seemed like the nightmare was always waiting for him and even though he never remembered it afterward, he knew it was always the same one. Breathing to the bottom of his lungs, he concentrated on the unsettled feeling he always got when he woke from that dream until his eyelids grew heavy and began to sink of their own accord. His chin fell to his chest. Vaguely, he heard Claude say something like, "Fuck me. It didn't actually work, did it?"

Hearing that far away voice, Peter looked up at the vast blue sky surrounding him and wondered where the words had come from. There were people walking by on the street far below the ledge where he stood, but they were too distant for the wind to have carried their voices up to him so clearly.

He lifted his face as he lined his toes up with the very edge of solid ground. Long strands of hair blew in his eyes, obscuring his vision as he considered his next move. His palms were soaked with sweat. His heart hammered in his chest. But underneath it all, there was a kind of peace. The peace that came with having a deep sense of purpose.

_The knack of flying is learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. The knack of flying--_

Filling his chest with air, he spread his arms out and allowed one foot to follow the other as he stepped out into the nothingness. For a moment, he felt supported by a cushion of wind currents. But then, as if in slow motion, he began to fall, the ground rushing up to meet him.

"Whoa, steady now."

The voice again but this time it was closer and Peter opened his eyes to find Claude's hands on his shoulders, pushing him back onto the couch from where he'd been leaning forward, ready to tumble onto the floor. Startled by the shift in reality, it took a minute for Peter to orient himself. When he did, he found that he was staring into three wide-eyed, eager faces. Even Mohinder had gotten to his feet.

"What the bleeding hell was that?" Claude asked, breaking the silence.

It had been his nightmare. Of that Peter was sure and he opened his mouth to tell them so but something stopped him. True, this was what he'd been dreaming every night without knowing it. But it was also more than that. It was a memory. It had to be. A memory of him flinging himself off of a roof.

Had he tried to kill himself?

Unsettled by the idea, Peter brushed his damp palms across his thighs, willing his heart to slow itself back to a more normal rhythm. He managed an impish grin but there was no hiding the shaking of his voice as he said, "Man, you guys are way too easy."

"You tricked us!" Molly exclaimed, delighted by Peter's supposed ruse.

Claude and Mohinder, however, were clearly not convinced. Both men frowned at Peter, who cast about for some kind of diversion from the coming inquisition.

"I think it's Molly's turn," he said, reaching down to the floor and picking up the necklace Claude had dropped when he'd moved to prevent Peter from falling out of his seat. Peter rose, gesturing for Molly to take his place on the couch, which she did with no small amount of enthusiasm.

But Mohinder was quick to intervene. "I think maybe Molly should rest for a while," he said as Peter settled himself on the edge of the coffee table, already dangling the pendant in his hand.

"I feel fine," Molly insisted and it almost would have been convincing except for the remaining pallor of her cheeks and the shadows beneath her eyes. "Besides, I want Peter to hypnotize me. Please?"

"Are you sure you're not too scared?" Peter teased while Mohinder and Claude exchanged a thoroughly unsubtle look behind them.

Molly made an indignant noise.

"I don't know," Mohinder said.

"It's just for a little while," Peter replied, hoping to convey through his tone that getting Molly out of the room wouldn't make him any more amenable to confessing his vision.

Mohinder eyed Molly, who fairly hummed with excitement. It was a complete turnaround from the dark mood she'd been in all day.

"All right, then," he said, relenting.

Permission granted, Peter turned back to Molly. "Okay," he said, holding the necklace in front of her face. He moved his wrist so it began to swing back and forth in a smooth arc. She watched it carefully. "Don't turn your head. Just follow it with your eyes."

"You're doing it wrong," Claude said from beside Peter on the table.

"No he's not," Molly said, immediately coming to Peter's defense. In a reassuring voice, she added to Peter, "I'm getting sleepy."

"Right," Peter said. "Very sleepy."

Beside him, Claude moved away, the sleeve of his coat brushing against Peter's arm so that goosebumps rose up along his skin. It went without saying that, like Mohinder, Claude knew Peter was hiding something and that he wasn't above pushing Peter to find out what it was. For the first time since they'd met, Peter found himself dreading being alone with the invisible man.


	8. Chapter 8

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 8/17**

"All right, let's have it then," Claude said as he riffled through a wallet he'd just liberated from the back pocket of some tourist. A few credit cards…useless. School photos of no less than five children, all under the age of ten…sickening. A ticket for a play that was showing that night on Broadway…potentially interesting. He didn't relish the idea of scalping tickets, especially since he had to be visible to do it, but it had been a slow day. Even Peter was being more boring than usual.

"Have what?" the boy said, watching with an obviously pained conscience as Claude emptied the wallet of its contents and then threw what he didn't need over his shoulder as they walked.

Actually, Claude didn't know what it was he'd meant to say, only that he needed to do something to get Peter talking. A week had passed since their play at hypnosis in Suresh's flat and Claude couldn't help but notice that Peter had become somewhat withdrawn since then. Normally, Claude wasn't concerned about acting in deference to the feelings of others, but so far he had yet to touch the subject of what had really happened during that long couple of minutes where Peter had gone all unresponsive on them. Suresh had worried that Peter had had some sort of fit--that perhaps whatever had damaged his memory was now manifesting itself as some kind of seizure. Bizarre as the whole thing had been, it wasn't like Peter had started speaking in tongues, so Claude felt there was nothing to worry about on the score. But it was clear from how uncharacteristically tight-lipped Peter was now being about the subject that something had happened. If Claude had yet to find out what it was, it was only because he felt he couldn't afford to lose the boy's attention before they'd managed to make any meaningful progress on the subject of Peter's lost powers. Besides that, Claude knew Peter. The boy was utterly incapable of keeping secrets. It was only a matter of time before he started talking about it on his own.

For now, Claude was stuck voicing the first thing that came to mind.

"The age old question, friend," he said. "If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?" He remembered with some distaste that he'd found this particular inquiry in a book of conversation-starting questions he'd stolen off someone's table at a café once.

"Oh," Peter said, his brow furrowing. "I don't know. I guess I hadn't really thought about it."

"Everyone's thought about it," Claude said. "Me, I'm content with invisibility. But if you think about it, there's a world of possibilities out there."

"Like what?" Peter asked. "The only ones I know about are you and Nathan and Molly."

"Yeah, but your brother's power is just a big cliché. I mean, everyone wants to fly until they actually get up there and do it and then they find out it's all bugs in your teeth and burn marks on the bottoms of your feet," Claude said. "And let's face it, Molly's power sounds more like a plot device from some bad comic book than anything anyone would actually want to be able to do."

Peter smirked, which was better than the righteous indignation Claude had been expecting when he'd delivered the comment. The boy was strangely protective of both his brother and the little girl. Normally, he didn't tolerate it when Claude cast aspersions on their respective characters. Suresh was the same, at least as far as Molly went.

"So what else is there?" Peter asked.

Claude wracked his brain. "There's time travel," he said.

"That's not an ability," Peter argued. "That's…something you build a machine for."

"I'll have you know there are people in the world who have the ability to manipulate time and space," Claude replied, mock primly. Of course, the only person he knew who could do it was Peter himself but he must have gotten the ability from somewhere. "Also, there's super strength. The ability to manipulate technology…that is, talk to computers. Walking through walls. The ability to heal yourself from injuries. Seeing the future. Telekinesis. Reading minds. That sort of thing."

Peter raised an eyebrow at him. "And how do you know about all this again?" he asked.

In truth, Claude was working from a list Suresh had given him. He'd written down everything he could remember about the abilities he'd seen demonstrated by the people he'd met in Kirby Plaza that night Peter had nearly blown the city all to hell. Chances were that Peter had at least seen these people if only in passing and that their powers had been his at one point or another, if only briefly. It was easier to use this as a reference than anything he might have seen while working for that supposed paper company all those years ago.

"Your friend Suresh might have let something slip," he said. "People he knows about." He waved his hand vaguely. "So which one would it be? Which power would you pick?" He felt himself getting impatient now.

"A photographic memory would be nice," Peter said after some thought.

"That's hardly a special ability," Claude said.

"It is to me," Peter said. "Don't forget you're talking to the guy who needs a map and a picture of Spongebob Squarepants hanging on his apartment door just to figure out where he lives on a daily basis. A photographic memory sounds pretty nice to me."

"Hmm," was all Claude could think to say. "That picture is a travesty, by the way."

"You're the one who told Mohinder to put it there," Peter said, sounding not a little resentful.

"Maybe so but how was I to know he'd have her paint by numbers with some obnoxious cartoon character she got from a coloring book?" Claude said. "I thought sure he'd have her do a nice little family portrait. You know, 'Me and My Two Daddies.'"

Peter gave him what could only be described as a withering look. "For the last time, Mohinder and I aren't sleeping together," he said.

"Maybe not but it's not like you haven't thought about it," Claude said, the teasing words falling more heavily than he meant them to as Peter's cheeks reddened noticeably. "You might have done if little Molly wasn't in the way all the time. Listening through those thin walls. All the trauma she's been through, mustn't make things harder for her than they already are by adding to the confusion."

"Are you done yet?" Peter asked.

"I could go on for hours," Claude said, but really he couldn't. Thinking of Suresh and Peter together like that made his stomach roil. He didn't like to think why. "But I seem to recall I asked you a question about three blocks back now and I'm still waiting for an answer. Quit shuffling your feet already and pick something."

"I think I already did," Peter said.

"Photographic memory doesn't count," Claude said.

"Why the hell not?"

"Too common," Claude said. "Not part of the evolutionary process, just proof that the person who has it is either an extremely irritating liar or an extremely irritating freak."

Peter sighed and reached up as if to brush his hair out of his face, a ghost of a nervous habit as there was nothing there in the first place. Claude had noticed him doing this on more than occasion and thought it highly amusing if only because Peter sometimes poked himself in the eye while doing it.

"Maybe you want to be an empath," Claude said when another block had gone by and Peter still hadn't said anything. Time to roll the dice.

"An empath?" Peter repeated. "What's that?"

"Someone who can do a bit of everything," Claude said. "Sort of like a sponge. They acquire their powers by being exposed to other people with powers. Like you'd be able to turn invisible just from standing next to me."

Peter made a face. "That sounds dangerous," he said.

Claude felt the sudden urge to walk up to a wall and start banging his head against it.

"That's your brother talking," he said.

"What does my brother have to do with it?" Peter shot back.

"He's set a bad example," Claude said. "He's filled your head with all these beliefs that there's something dirty or wrong about having a special ability. Admit it--much as you like being Suresh's pretty little lab assistant, there's something in you that's afraid of what I can do and what Molly can do. Why are you like that? Because of him. Him and all those secrets he keeps."

"Yeah, because it isn't Molly getting sick every few weeks that could have made me think having an ability might be dangerous," Peter said. "Or that guy Sylar that was killing all those people so he could get their powers."

Claude's steps slowed. "How do you know about him?" he asked.

"Mohinder mentioned it when he told me about his father," Peter said, waving it off as if Sylar didn't concern him personally. As if he hadn't had a very public battle with the man in Kirby Plaza just a few months back. Which, as far as Peter knew, he hadn't. "Then there was the explosion."

Claude's mouth went dry. "Explosion?" he said.

"That one that went off over the city a few months ago," Peter said and again Claude was struck by the matter-of-fact way Peter could talk about these traumatic things he didn't even know had happened to him. "That was someone who lost control of their powers, right?"

"What makes you say so?" Claude asked carefully.

"The footage I've seen when they talk about it on the news. The bomb…it goes up, not down," Peter said. "Like it was trying to get away." He gave Claude a dry look. "Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think the point of a bomb is for it to get farther away from its target."

"Interesting theory," Claude said.

"Yeah, well, if it's true then that guy is probably dead. He's just lucky he didn't take half the city with him," Peter said. "So don't try to convince me that powers can't be dangerous. And quit pissing on my brother all the time. You don't even know him."

Those last words were familiar enough and Claude suddenly remembered that Peter had said them before. Their first day of training, they'd stood in front of rows and rows of Nathan Petrelli grinning down on them from those ubiquitous campaign posters and Peter had insisted to Claude like the tirelessly naïve child he had been that his brother was more than worthy of the hero worship lavished upon him. Peter's theory had stretched the limits of believability for Claude back then and that was based only on what he knew of people from wandering unseen in their homes. Needless to say, time had done nothing to improve his opinion of Peter's brother despite his supposedly noble act the night of the bomb. Maybe Nathan Petrelli had meant to sacrifice himself by saving his brother that night, but as far as Claude could tell it had been a damn close thing. Like maybe he'd had to think about it first.

After a while, Peter sighed, sounding almost sullen now. "Look, I'm just not special like that, okay?" he said. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I was."

"I'm sure you'd think of something," Claude said. "Helping little old ladies across the street. Rescuing kittens from trees. Right up your alley, that. We might even make you a nice cape and a mask or something."

Peter said nothing.

"Look, it's not that you're wrong," Claude went on. "I mean, it's not like there's a support group for people who suddenly wake up one day and find out they have a special ability. There are no books written that include advice on how powers like that should be used so that you don't harm yourself or other people in the process. It can be a dangerous thing. That much is true."

"But?" Peter prompted knowingly.

"But it was a hypothetical question," Claude said. "And you can't even bring yourself to answer it. At least not in a way that means anything. What does that tell you?"

"I just don't see the point of wondering," Peter said. "It's not like anyone has a choice. You've either got an ability or you don't." He lifted his shoulders. "I don't. End of story."

Claude didn't know what he'd been expecting when he'd asked the question in the first place. The Peter he'd known had always seemed enthusiastic enough about what he could do, even when he found out how dangerous it could be. It was entirely possible he'd anticipated that some scrap of that old excitement still existed in this new person, some trace of that childlike wonder. But this Peter had only known special abilities as dirty secrets that came with potentially troublesome health problems and a descent into moral ambiguity. Peter wasn't the type to start listing the pros and cons that came with each ability like some fan boy at a comic convention. His interest in the subject was purely impersonal and the thought of it being otherwise scared the hell out of him.

They arrived outside the familiar apartment building in a silence that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Peter moved to go inside but Claude didn't follow.

"I'm stopping here," he said.

Peter turned back toward him. "You are?" he said.

"Yeah," Claude replied. "Got appointments to keep, you know. Very busy person, me." The truth was he'd been neglecting the pigeons lately. So much for free will when no one was around to let them out of their cages.

"Oh," Peter said.

"See you at the shop tomorrow like usual, yeah?" Claude said.

"No," Peter said. "Um, my brother's going to be in town this weekend. He wants to see me while he's here. Make sure I haven't forgotten about him since the last time I saw him."

Of all the people Peter could have forgotten, it was Claude's bitter belief that Nathan Petrelli was the one who had the least to worry about. If nothing else, Peter had memories of him from times that hadn't been wiped away by whatever it was had happened. It was only people like Claude and Suresh who got discarded into that particular rubbish bin.

"Sounds like a barrelful of monkeys," Claude said. "Sorry I'll have to miss it." He stuck his hands in his pockets. "Where was it you said you were meeting him again?"

TBC

_Another big thank you to those who have left such lovely reviews! I hope you continue to enjoy!_


	9. Chapter 9

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 9/17**

"Peter. You're here."

The front desk at the hotel had insisted on calling up to Nathan's room before allowing Peter to go up but the note of surprise Nathan greeted him with was that of someone faced with an unexpected visitor and suddenly Peter felt self-conscious. Glancing down at his watch, he was almost sure he had the right time. In fact, he was actually a few minutes early for their arranged visit. Could it be that he had the wrong day?

"We said Saturday, right?" Peter asked, frantically searching his mind as he tried to figure out what day it was.

"We did," Nathan said. "I guess I just thought maybe I'd get a few phone calls asking for directions before you actually got here. But you found the place okay. That's good." He clamped a hand on Peter's shoulder, leading him inside the hotel suite he'd rented for the weekend. He sounded like a proud father after a hard won Little League game.

Peter cleared his throat. "Yeah, I've gotten better about writing things down," he said, holding up the sticky note on which he'd scribbled the address Nathan had given him over the phone. No need to bring up the dozen other sticky notes he'd written to remind himself where he'd left the one with the address on it in the first place. "The cab driver deserves credit for the rest."

"Oh. Well, still," Nathan said, following Peter into the elaborately decorated room. They still had the family house in town for the times when Congress wasn't in session but for his weekend visits, Nathan preferred to stay in hotels. It made it harder for Peter to find him but at least it didn't require him to dust off any furniture or stock the refrigerator. "Did you have enough money for the cab?"

"Tipped the guy and everything," Peter said dryly.

"Good," Nathan said. "Well, why don't you have a seat. It's been a while."

Obediently, Peter sat on the edge of one of the overstuffed couches that had been set up in the room's common area. Nathan settled across from him, hands clasped between his open knees. They sat for a moment in awkward silence before Peter thought to ask, "How are Heidi and the kids?"

"They're doing well," Nathan said. "The kids miss you. They wanted to come with me to see you but I told them maybe some other time. I mean, I wasn't sure how you'd be feeling and I didn't want to…impose or anything."

Peter looked down at his hands, debating whether or not to call Nathan on the obvious spin he'd put on that story. The truth was, Nathan didn't want to run the risk of upsetting the boys by exposing them to an uncle who might not remember who they were from one minute to the next. What Nathan never seemed to fully grasp was that Peter knew his family. If nothing else, they were embedded in years of memories that had taken place before that lost time. He might occasionally be surprised by how old they looked compared to his more cemented memories of them but he would never forget them completely or even blank out on their names for more than a few minutes.

Nathan cleared his throat. "So," he said, "how are Dr. Suresh and…is it Molly?"

"Yeah," Peter said. "They're fine, I guess. Molly still gets sick sometimes but it seems like it's not happening as often as it used to, so that's good. Mohinder's been keeping busy with this new guy he's been working with. Claude."

"Oh?" Nathan said in that blandly icy way he must have learned from their mother.

"Claude Rains," Peter said. "Guess what he can do." He rolled his eyes, expecting Nathan to pick up on the joke. He was sure they'd watched _The Invisible Man _together at some point. Some long ago Halloween when Peter had been little and Nathan had purposely been trying to scare him while their parents were off at a party.

"I haven't a clue, Pete," Nathan said.

Peter was tempted to challenge Nathan to google the name and find out for himself but instead decided to make it easy on his brother. "He can turn invisible."

"Really?" Nathan said. From his tone, Peter might have just told him Claude could belch the alphabet or peel a banana with his toes. He even made a show of looking around the room as if expecting to find Claude wandering around in it somewhere, unseen. "That's very…interesting."

"You should see him, Nathan," Peter pressed on. "He's been doing it for years and he's, like, made a whole lifestyle out of it. It's really amazing."

"I bet," Nathan said, flashing Peter a brief, strained smile. "Hey, listen, would you like something to drink? I completely forgot to ask when you came in." He was already circling around to the suite's small bar. "I was thinking of fixing myself a Scotch anyway."

"Uh, no thanks," Peter said as Nathan busied himself with the various bottles and glasses. He could imagine the kind of comment Claude would make if he was here to see this--not just that Nathan was drinking so early in the morning but also that, for a politician, he had no talent for subtlety when it came to changing the subject.

"Tell me, Pete," Nathan said eventually, carefully counting out ice cubes as they clinked their way into his glass. "How's your memory been lately?"

Peter looked down at his hands. "About the same," he said. "I mean, at this point it's more about learning to cope than it is trying to get my memory to work the way it's supposed to." He cleared his throat. "Actually, Claude's been trying to help me with that. He got Mohinder to hang one of Molly's drawings on the apartment door so I'd be able to find it better."

"Hmm," Nathan said, contemplating the liquid in his glass. "So, what? Is this Claude an expert on memory or something?"

"Not that I know of," Peter said.

"Not that you know of?" Nathan repeated, a little incredulous. "Why do I feel like I should be giving you the lecture I always give the kids about not getting into cars with strangers who offer them candy?"

Peter couldn't help but bristle. "I'm not a little kid, Nathan," he said. "I know I'm not all there anymore but give me some credit, will you? Claude is my friend. He's just trying to help. You make it sound like he's asking for sexual favors or something."

"Jesus, Peter," Nathan said, setting his glass down hard. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "I never thought I'd say this but I'm really beginning to wish for those days back when you were pining for that painter's girlfriend. What was her name again?"

It took Peter a second to realize Nathan was actually asking him. "Would it make things easier for you right now if I pretended to know who you were talking about?"

Nathan blinked at him before looking away. "Damn," he said, the word like a fist going through dry wall. "I forgot you didn't know her until after…"

"After what?"

"Nothing," Nathan said. "It's not important."

"Tell me," Peter said.

Nathan shook his head. "I can't," he said.

"Why not?" Peter asked, hearing the petulance in his own voice. "Don't I deserve to know? I mean, was this girl important to me? Who was her boyfriend?

Nathan held up a forestalling hand. "Just don't," he said. "This…this isn't like hanging a picture on your door so you'll remember which one is yours, okay? Maybe it's selfish of me but…I don't want you to learn how to cope. I want you to learn how to remember. And I don't think you can do that if I'm handing you these old stories all the time."

"At least give me her name," Peter said, affecting a joking tone that fell flat between them. "Maybe I can go ask _her_ what happened."

If possible, Nathan's face became even more stony. "You can't ask her anything anymore, Peter," he said. "She's dead."

Peter swallowed, feeling like the bottom of his stomach had just dropped out. "What?" he said.

"She was killed," Nathan said. "It's complicated. But her boyfriend did it. You were there when it happened."

"Her boyfriend killed her?" Peter said. "But why?"

Nathan hesitated. "It was an accident," he said.

"Is he in jail now?"

"No," Nathan said. "He's dead too."

Peter felt some unnamable emotion swell in his chest. "You're lying."

"I'm not lying," Nathan said.

Peter shifted in his seat. "I didn't…I didn't kill him, did I?"

"No," Nathan said firmly enough that Peter believed him.

There was a pause between them as Peter struggled to piece together what Nathan was saying. These small tidbits of information meant nothing to Peter and yet a profound sense of guilt washed over him. These people had died and it sounded like he was at least partly to blame for that. Didn't he owe them the courtesy of at least remembering what they looked like? Of having some emotional attachment to their memories?

"There," Nathan said, breaking into his thoughts. "You see? This is why I don't tell you things. All it does is confuse you."

Peter stared at the floor. "This woman that died…is that…" He hesitated. "Is that why I tried to kill myself?"

He hadn't meant to bring up the vision. At least, not like this. But it had been pressing on his mind ever since the fake hypnosis, haunting him now even when he was awake. And now it was beginning to change, getting worse. Most of the time he still saw himself standing atop that building, stepping off the ledge of his own free will. But now there were other times when someone else was there with him. A faceless person whose presence he felt mostly as the weight of a hand on his shoulder as, helpless, he was thrown over the side, screaming.

"What did you say?" Nathan asked, voice hollow.

"It's this dream I keep having," Peter said.

Nathan moved around the bar and came to sit in the chair next to Peter, trying to catch his brother's eye. Peter looked anywhere around the room but at Nathan.

"Did I, Nate?" he asked, hating the fragility that had entered his voice. "Did I try to kill myself?"

Nathan pressed his lips together and took a breath that filled his chest, exhaling slowly as he selected his words with obvious care. "You jumped off a building once," he said. "But Peter--"

"Fuck," Peter said, the word bursting from him unexpectedly. "Is that why I can't remember? Is that what happened to me? I jumped from some building and hit my head on the way down?"

"No," Nathan said. "Your fall was weeks before you lost your memory. Weeks before Simone Deveaux and Isaac Mendez died, even. Believe me when I say it had nothing to do with either of those things."

"Simone and Isaac," Peter said, repeating the unfamiliar names and feeling nothing. "If it wasn't anything to do with them, then why did I do it? Why did I jump?"

It was Nathan's turn not to look at Peter. Instead, he focused on his hands, twisting his gold watch around his wrist until it left a red circle on his skin. Realizing what he was doing, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand over his face. Suddenly, he seemed exhausted.

"Why did I jump?" Peter repeated.

"Maybe someday you'll be able to tell me, Pete," Nathan said.

This wasn't the reply of someone who didn't know the answer to the question he was being asked. Rather than asking Peter to give him information he didn't already have, Nathan was challenging him, the same way he challenged his sons whenever they came to him with their reading assignments from school. Stumbling across a difficult word, they'd ask their father what it meant and instead of telling them, he'd hand them the dictionary so they could find out on their own. This, Peter knew, was Nathan's way of directing him to the dictionary.

It was also his way of avoiding the question.

"The important thing isn't that you jumped, Peter," Nathan continued after a minute. "The important thing is that you survived. Think about it."

But the way Peter saw it, there wasn't anything to think about. Depression ran in their family; that much his mother and Nathan had been truthful with him about since he'd woken up to find his memories missing. It just made sense that he, the eminent screw up and black sheep of the family, had inherited the gene for falling while Nathan, the perfect, heroic son, had inherited the one for flying. Somehow, nothing about the revelation surprised him. He felt only numbness.

"Look, Peter," Nathan said. "I know remembering something like that can't be easy. I mean, leaping off that building wasn't your proudest moment. I know I don't like to think about it. But at least you're making progress, right? At least it's something. Something you've remembered."

"I didn't remember it," Peter said, his voice colorless. "It was always there. I just…didn't want to see it." He felt the truth of his words only as he said them. This was why he hadn't remembered his dream until Claude had accidentally hypnotized him into it. It was a memory he hadn't been ready to see.

"Peter--"

"I have to go," Peter said, rising suddenly. "I can't be here anymore."

"What?" Nathan said. "You just got here. You don't have to run off--"

But Peter was already heading for the door. He suddenly couldn't stand the thought of being in a room with someone who knew so much more about his past than he did. Who could dangle scraps of information in front of him and then act like he needed a credit card to know more. It was hard enough not knowing who he had been or what he had done. What was even harder was not knowing whether he even wanted the answers to those questions anymore.


	10. Chapter 10

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 10/17**

When Peter came storming out of Nathan Petrelli's hotel suite just a half hour or so after he'd gone in, he came within inches of tripping over Claude, who had been counting ceiling tiles from an invisible position he'd taken up on a nearby patch of floor. As it was, Peter's foot barely scraped against his and the resulting stumble could, to anyone who saw it, easily have been attributed to the boy's natural lack of grace. By the time Nathan Petrelli came chasing after his brother, Claude had gained his feet and pressed himself against the wall. He watched as Peter escaped inside an unusually well-timed lift, the door sliding shut before his brother could reach him.

"Peter, wait," Petrelli said to his own reflection, shoulders sagging a bit when he realized there wasn't going to be any kind of response. Placing his hands on his hips, he waited a bit as if expecting the lift to come back but it never did. Dejected, all he seemed able to do was return to his room, the door to which had been conveniently left open. Claude took the opportunity to let himself in, moving to the side as Petrelli entered after him.

It occurred to Claude as he watched the other man pace about the expansive hotel room that he had never actually seen Nathan Petrelli in person before. His first thought was that Petrelli was not as tall as he had expected. Not much taller than Peter even, if slightly less runt-like for all that he was built a bit more on the stocky side than his stringy little brother. The rest of it made sense. Everything from the rolled up shirt sleeves on a Saturday to the glass of watered down Scotch sitting on the table in the middle of the room. This, apparently, was the man worth rigging an election for. The man who had saved the day, flying his brother to safety when he could have just reminded him that a few deep breaths and some concentration might have kept him from blowing up in the first place.

After a few minutes of aimless puttering and still no sign that Peter was coming back, Petrelli pulled out his mobile and navigated the menu to what was obviously a familiar number. Walking to the window, he stared out at the city as he waited for the person on the other end to pick up.

"Suresh?" he said. "It's Nathan Petrelli.

The volume on his phone was turned up high and the room was quiet enough that all Claude had to do was move a little closer in order to hear what it was Suresh was saying back.

"Hello, Nathan." A less than deferential tone. "What can I help you with?"

"It's my brother," Petrelli said. Suresh said something that came out slightly muffled to Claude's ears. "No, he got here fine. It's just that he left a little earlier than I expected. I don't know where he went. I just thought you should keep an eye out for him in case…well, in case he doesn't know where he went either."

"Right," Suresh said. "May I ask what happened?"

"Nothing," Petrelli said. "He just got a little angry with me. It's nothing."

Claude was vaguely amazed, despite what he'd just seen. He hadn't known it was possible for Peter to become angry with his brother. At any rate, he hadn't heard raised voices from outside the room, but then it probably wasn't the Petrelli way to yell at one another, even in private. They seemed more the type for "heated discussions" between family than shouting matches for all to see and hear.

"One more thing," Petrelli said after Suresh had replied to his obvious non-answer. "Uh, Peter mentioned a new friend. A test subject of yours. Claude Rains, I think. Does that sound familiar?"

Claude raised an eyebrow. Was Petrelli trying to imply that he thought Claude might be Peter's imaginary friend?

"Of course," Suresh said. "Claude's been with us for several weeks now. Why do you ask?"

"You never mentioned him," Petrelli replied stiffly.

"I didn't see a reason to," Suresh said back. "Besides which, I find that I have no reliable means of contacting you unless I specify that it's an emergency. Claude Rains is not an emergency."

Claude was almost touched to hear this.

"No?" Petrelli said, skepticism evident in his voice. "You know that my brother could turn invisible before he lost his powers, right?"

"I do," Suresh said.

"He had to have gotten that talent from somewhere, don't you think?"

"I imagine that he did," Suresh replied dryly.

"So don't you think it's possible that this Claude guy knew him back then?"

A pause. "Perhaps you should ask him about that yourself, Mr. Petrelli."

Fucking Suresh. How had he known? Traitor.

"What do you mean?" Petrelli asked. But he was already looking around the room in a way that suggested he knew exactly what Suresh meant.

"Claude was supposed to come here this morning for a test I had scheduled with him," Suresh said mildly. "Suffice to say, he never showed up."

Claude winced. He'd completely forgotten about that. Sneaky bastard.

"And you think he followed my brother here."

"It's entirely possible that Claude has a few things he wants to talk with you about, yes," Suresh said.

"To talk to me about?" Petrelli said. "What could he possibly want from me?"

"I was thinking maybe we could start with a deep philosophical discussion on the nature of human evolution and end with you telling me what it is you did to make your brother forget everything and, more importantly, how it can be undone," Claude said, making himself visible before Suresh could reply.

Petrelli jumped back, dropping the phone he'd been holding. "Jesus Christ," he gasped involuntarily before managing to recover his dignity. For his part, Claude remained leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest in what he hoped was a picture of effortless intimidation. He thought about examining his nails for effect but decided it was too over the top and so simply fixed his gaze on Petrelli, who was becoming less impressed with the situation with each passing second.

"Okay, I'll start," Claude went on when Petrelli failed to respond. "Do you believe Darwin's theory of human evolution is inherently atheistic or is the belief in God in fact compatible with his views on natural selection?" He made a show of tilting his head as if he were sincerely interested in Petrelli's answer before pressing on. "Oh yeah, and what the fuck did you do with your brother's memories and can we please have them back?"

Petrelli's face remained impassive. He said nothing.

"Look, mate, you can mentally roll your eyes at me all you like but I'm not leaving here until I get some answers from you," Claude said, now nearly nose to nose with Petrelli. "So start talking or things are going to get very ugly very fast, I can promise you that."

To Claude's great annoyance, Petrelli didn't shrink in fear but instead moved away, picking up the half-full Scotch glass from the table where it had been sitting as he went. He made his way back over to the bar where he set the glass down atop the elegantly polished wood. His jaw worked all the while as if he was sucking on an idea that was particularly sour to him.

"What is this about, Mr. Rains?" he asked. "What do you want with my brother?"

"Well, you see, I have reason to believe Peter knows the secret code to the chamber where I left the magical ancient artifact that gives us all our powers and I need him to get his memories back so I can access that chamber and save us all from certain destruction," Claude replied. "Also, I was thinking I could possibly extort some money out of you. As you can see, I'm not exactly rolling in it." He indicated his clothes.

Petrelli stared at Claude for a moment, a vaguely withering gaze. "You're a funny man," he said without any hint that he believed this to be true. "What's the real answer? Why are you here?"

"I think I was pretty clear about that before."

"You think I'm somehow responsible for my brother's memory loss," Petrelli said.

"Oh, good. You are listening," Claude said. "I was getting worried there for a second."

"What makes you think I had anything to do with that?"

"Well, your less than perfect track record for one thing," Claude said. "For another, it's all a bit suspicious to me. That is, I'm not an expert on amnesia or anything but I'd say Peter's case is a bit unusual given just how specific his memory loss is. There's a shape to that blankness and it all has to do with his powers." He lifted his shoulders. "Suresh thinks something happened to Peter during the bomb. I'm thinking there's more to it than that." He arched an eyebrow at Petrelli. "Am I close?"

Instead of answering, Petrelli pressed his lips together thoughtfully. "So I take it Suresh has been working on recovering Peter's memories?"

"Trying, anyway. Didn't get very far," Claude said.

"Apparently not if the only thing my brother seems to know about that part of his past is that he once threw himself over the side of a building," Petrelli said, his eyes finding the ceiling.

Claude nearly choked at that. "Come again?" he said.

Petrelli looked back down, his eyes meeting Claude's. "Just something he said today," he replied. "A memory I thought might have surfaced but Peter claims he's known it the whole time. Or that he knew it without knowing it. Who the hell knows? Peter doesn't exactly put a lot of effort into making sense."

"Probably because nothing makes sense to him," Claude said.

Petrelli made a gesture, conceding the point before saying, "You knew him before." It wasn't a question.

"I did," Claude said. "Briefly."

"Haven't you told him anything?"

Claude shook his head. "All he's got as far as I know is that one little scrap of a memory. And let me guess…you convinced him that the whole thing was a suicide attempt. Same way you tried to convince the public first time round."

"I didn't convince him of anything," Petrelli said. "I acknowledged that he'd once taken a less than accidental fall off of a roof. The rest he assumed on his own."

"And you let him."

"I had to," Petrelli said, voice taut.

"Why?" Claude said. "Afraid he'd remember something you didn't want him to know?"

"No," Petrelli said. "I was afraid he'd remember something he didn't want himself to know."

Claude felt his jaw snap shut on the tirade he'd been about to launch into and for a moment all he could do was stand in the silence of the hotel room staring at Nathan Petrelli, stunned. For his part, Petrelli stared back evenly, patient as he waited for what he'd said to sink in properly.

"I didn't take anything from Peter," Petrelli said eventually. "That was all him. That was how he wanted it."

It would have been easy to believe Petrelli was lying. After all he'd done in the past to hide not only his own but Peter's powers as well, it would have made sense for this just to be another instance of him trying to cover his own ass. But what he was saying also made a kind of sense, in the most fucked up way possible. Peter wasn't a victim. He was an idiot. He had always been an idiot. If what Petrelli was saying was true then he had simply achieved a level of idiocy previously undiscovered by a fully functioning human being.

The thought left Claude feeling incredulous and numb.

"How?" he asked, voice hollow. "How did he do it?"

Petrelli sighed. "What you have to understand is that after the bomb, Peter wasn't himself," he said. "He was horrified by what had almost happened. To him. To the city. To me."

Claude thought to ask how exactly it was that Nathan had managed to survive the bomb but all he could do was listen as the politician told his story.

"So basically Peter sent himself on the guilt trip of a lifetime," Petrelli went on. "He kept having these…panic attacks. His hands would start to glow like they did that night. He was convinced the explosion was going to happen all over again. A few times it almost did."

"And what? Instead of learning how to control it he decided to forget about his powers altogether?" Claude asked. "Now why does that sound astonishingly fitting?"

Petrelli's frown deepened. "It was actually my mother's idea more than Peter's," he said. "My mother couldn't handle seeing him the way he was. That is, when she saw him at all. Somehow he'd found out she knew about the bomb ahead of time and had been prepared to let it happen. It wasn't until she started dropping hints about this connection she had with a man who had a talent for 'relieving people of unwanted or inconvenient memories' that he started letting her around again."

"Bloody hell," Claude breathed. "The Haitian."

The name came back to him from those long ago days when he'd been working for the Company. Of course, the Haitian had only been a boy at the time but even then his powers had been strong. No telling what time and practice had done to improve his abilities.

Petrelli confirmed Claude's suspicions with a solemn nod.

"I should have known," Claude said. "I should have bloody well known." He slammed his fist into a nearby wall, hard enough to startle Petrelli but not hard enough to affect the man's bill at the end of his stay. "And where were you when all this was happening? Didn't you do anything to stop it?"

Petrelli hesitated. "Look, I'd be lying if I said the idea didn't have some appeal at first," he said. "I mean, the way things were looking, Peter was going to blow himself up all over again and between my work and my family I couldn't be around all the time to make sure that didn't happen. We were all at risk. But I thought maybe there could be a compromise where the only memories taken from Peter were the ones of that Ted Sprague guy. Just so he didn't have to worry about turning into a nuclear explosion again. But Peter said he wanted it all gone. He didn't want to know a thing about his powers."

"So you just let it happen."

Petrelli's eyes narrowed. "Hardly," he said. "I kept as close a watch as I could. Peter was already staying with us while he recovered so it wasn't that hard. But I guess I never believed he'd actually do anything so I may have slipped a little here and there." He cleared his throat. "All I know is one day I came home and it was done."

"Fuck me," Claude said. "So why don't you just tell him, then? If you were so against his forgetting in the first place, why don't you be honest with him about what happened during that missing time?"

"I'm just honoring his wishes," Petrelli replied. "And, frankly, I have trouble believing he'll never remember." He held up a hand to stop Claude reminding him of the exact nature of the Haitian's talents. "I know. But no one is supposed to come back from the dead either and I've seen Peter do that, too."

"It's not the same," Claude said.

Petrelli's expression faltered slightly. "Well, then, I guess Peter got his wish," Petrelli said. "This is what he wanted. Now you know."

The words echoed in Claude's mind, settling inside him uncomfortably. He wondered suddenly why he hadn't seen this coming. Knowing what he did about the boy, the possibility should at least have occurred to him before now. Instead he stood blindsided, the weight of resignation threatening to crush him as he thought of all that wasted time and effort, trying to coax Peter into remembering. There weren't many who would subject themselves to the Haitian's powers voluntarily. And as far as Claude knew, no one who did ever got back what he had taken.

No one.

TBC


	11. Chapter 11

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 11/17**

"I'll never understand how a man who resides in a single room apartment furnished with only a filthy mattress can possibly have the audacity to call my home a shit hole."

The comment came from Suresh, who looked around the cramped, closet-like space critically, hands held stiffly at his sides as if he was afraid to touch anything in it. His gaze passed right over Claude, who had pressed himself invisibly against the far wall upon hearing footsteps outside the door.

Suresh waited a few beats.

"I know you're here. I had Molly find you for me."

Damn.

"Using innocent little girls to do your dirty work for you again?" Claude said. "That's low, Suresh. Even for you."

"Well, it's not as though I could look you up in the phone directory," Suresh remarked dryly, unfazed as Claude appeared before him. "It's been days since we last saw you. I was afraid of what might have happened to you after your…meeting with Nathan Petrelli."

"Well, he didn't have my body thrown in a Dumpster or anything," Claude said.

"I can see that," Suresh replied.

Claude moved over to the window, running his fingers over the leaves of a potted plant that looked on its last legs, all brown and shriveled.

"I take it the Forgetful Wonder found his way home all right, then. Or did you have to use your little tracking system on him as well?"

"Forgetful Wonder?"

"Peter," Claude clarified.

"Yes, I know who you meant," Suresh said, rolling his eyes. "But…Forgetful Wonder?"

"I'm still working on it."

Amusement tugged alarmingly at one corner of Suresh's lips. "Peter's fine," he said. "A little distant since his meeting with his brother, perhaps but otherwise in one piece."

"Then all's well that ends well," Claude said. "This has been a fun little chat but I really--"

"What happened?" Suresh asked.

Claude stuffed his hands in his pockets, trying his best to look as reticent as possible, hoping Suresh would take the hint and not push him. But as Suresh stubbornly waited for an answer, it occurred to Claude that maybe the good doctor deserved to know the truth. Maybe it was time to share the burden a bit.

"If we're going to talk about this, can we do it outside?"

"Outside?" Suresh said. "Why can't we do it here?"

"Because I don't really live here and I don't want the junkie who does to come back in the middle of things," Claude said. "Follow me."

To his credit, Suresh kept his silence as they made their way up onto the roof of the building. Claude had been spending most of his time there lately, brooding over what Petrelli had told him in the hotel room that day. Lucky thing for Molly. Normally, Claude wasn't in the habit of lingering in one place for very long. Any other day and Suresh might have traveled halfway across the city to find he had already gone. But something had been keeping him still over the past week. Frozen in place, really. He'd found himself unable to go to Suresh or Peter but also unable to simply run away from it. Maybe in a dark corner of his mind he'd been waiting for this. Waiting for one of them to come to him.

Up on the roof, Suresh squinted in the sunlight, turning toward Claude expectantly.

"I'm packing in," Claude said finally.

Suresh blinked. "Packing in?" he repeated, the less than elegant phrase sounding awkward in his cultured professor's voice. "I don't understand. Did Nathan Petrelli threaten you?"

"Funnily enough, he didn't," Claude said, though he rather thought the threat had been implied right along with the phrase "honoring Peter's wishes."

"Then why?" Suresh said.

Claude toed the ground. "Have you ever heard of a man called the Haitian?"

Suresh shook his head.

"Surprising, that. Considering he's a close personal friend of your pal Noah Bennet," Claude said. "You know. Tall guy. Horn-rimmed glasses."

"How do you know about Bennet?" Suresh asked.

"Long story," Claude said. "And since we don't have time for a lively game of six degrees of separation just now, I'll spare you the effort of asking and just tell you that the Haitian is a man who specializes in screwing with people's minds. He has other talents too--he can disrupt another person's ability to access their powers, for example. Quite charming, really. But mostly he's used for cleaning out people's memories."

Suresh's eyes widened as he made the connection. "So you're saying this Haitian man…is the cause of Peter's memory loss?" he asked slowly.

Claude nodded.

"Then he attacked Peter?"

"No," Claude said. "That is, the way Nathan Petrelli tells it, the Haitian was an invited guest in the Petrelli household when he did what he did to Peter's memory."

Suresh considered this a moment, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "So you were right," he said. "It wasn't the bomb at all. Peter's family had his memory erased by this man, this Haitian." Being what he was, Suresh managed to sound both outraged and fascinated at the same time.

"Close," Claude said.

"Close?"

"It wasn't his family that did it," Claude said. "It was Peter himself. Special request."

Suresh paled.

"I don't understand," he said.

Claude shrugged. "There's nothing to understand," he said. "Peter won't remember. He doesn't want to."

A moment of heavy silence passed between them.

"Anyway, it's his own damn fault," Claude went on when Suresh failed to react in any satisfactory way. "He should have learned better. This whole damn mess could have been avoided if only he'd learned better. If only…" He paused. "If only I'd taught him better."

Suresh raised an eyebrow. "It's not like you to self-flagellate," he said.

Claude shook his head. "He just wanted it to be easy, you know?" He stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I couldn't make it easy for him."

Suresh rocked on his heels. "You have feelings for him, don't you?"

Claude stiffened at the seeming non sequitur. "If you count feeling like I want to bash his head in ninety percent of the time," he said. "But I think everyone who knows him feels that way at one point or another."

"And what about the other ten percent of the time?" Suresh asked shrewdly.

"That's when I want to choke him. And not in the fun way," Claude replied.

Suresh sighed.

"Look, how I do or don't feel about the boy has nothing to do with it," Claude said. "Not when he went and had us erased from his memory like we were nothing to him." He pressed his lips together, hearing the slight, traitorous waver of emotion in his own voice.

Suresh shifted. "May I ask you something?"

"Not if you're going to start in about all this feelings bullshit again," Claude replied.

"How did you feel when you first realized he didn't remember you?" Suresh asked as if Claude hadn't spoken.

Claude snorted. "You should know," he said. "Or don't you remember my slamming you up against a wall in front of Molly that day?"

"How could I forget?" Suresh said wryly. "But I mean the exact moment when he looked at you and you realized he didn't know who you were." By now, his brow had become furrowed and Claude knew he was stuck inside memories of his own. "Peter saved my life once. I watched him die doing it. It's painful to know he doesn't remember that. More painful to know even if I told him what had happened, it would still mean nothing to him. Like it was another person."

Claude gazed out toward the city, the tall buildings surrounding them. "He saved my life once as well," he said. "Afterward, I ran away from him thinking he'd betrayed me to some people I was trying to avoid. I just left him." He looked up, a warning glance at Suresh. "If you ever tell him I said it, I'll murder you in your sleep and I don't care if it doesn't mean anything to him to know but…I think what I hate most about his not remembering is the fact that I can't make that right."

Suresh looked at him with more sympathy than Claude was comfortable with; he had to look away.

"And there's nothing that can be done?" Suresh asked. "Nothing to undo the Haitian's work?"

"And go against Peter's wishes?" Claude said derisively. "No, he won't get his memories back. Not unless we find someone with the power to reverse what's been done but that might take some doing. Can't exactly put an ad in the paper."

Suresh continued to look disconcertingly pensive. "He won't remember anything that happened to him before," he said. "But I still believe he's not without his powers, though they may be buried."

Claude shook his head. "He didn't want his powers anymore. Maybe he doesn't deserve to have them back."

"And maybe it's more dangerous for him not to know," Suresh insisted. "I've been thinking about it ever since you offered to teach him. To nudge him in the right direction, as you put it. There are dangerous people out there with dangerous powers. Sylar was just one of them. Molly knows of at least one more, though it's nearly impossible to get her to talk about it. Whether he likes it or not, Peter is extraordinary and after what happened that night in Kirby Plaza, there are others who might begin to realize it too. He could become a target."

"Or he could be our best line of defense," Claude said with no small amount of irony.

"Perhaps our worst enemy, if we don't handle this correctly," Suresh mused. "You can't change what happened between the two of you, especially now that it's been erased from Peter's memory altogether. But maybe you _can _make it right. If you teach him again. So he learns this time."

Claude quirked an eyebrow. "For someone who didn't exactly want me around in the first place, you're awfully keen to have me back," he said. "Don't tell me I've done something to redeem myself to you."

Suresh looked vaguely ill at the idea. "If you really want to know, the truth is I never saw Peter light up so much as he did when he had a friend around he could talk to," he said. "Whatever feelings you may or may not have for him, it's my belief that he may or may not have the same feelings for you. I'd hate to see him lose that."

Suresh looked down at the street below them as Claude absorbed this.

"I think it's time we told him the truth," Suresh said eventually. "About everything."

"And what if we end up doing more damage than good?" Claude asked.

Suresh lifted his shoulders. "That's a risk we'll have to be willing to take." He threw a glance at Claude over his shoulder. "You threw him over the side once before, didn't you? Maybe it's time you did it again."

"Metaphorically speaking, of course," Claude said.

Suresh gave a careful, crooked smile. "Of course," he said.


	12. Chapter 12

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 12/17**

"Aren't you scared yet?"

Peter could see from the look on Claude's face that the question came out more genuinely peevish than he'd intended. Meanwhile, Molly sat between them, suppressing yet another giggle at the antics of the characters on the screen in front of them.

"This movie's supposed to be scary, you know," Claude pointed out. "He kills people for fun."

"I think he's funny," Molly said.

"Do you hear this?" Claude asked, addressing Peter over the top of Molly's head. "Power-mad, murderous scientists are _funny_, she says."

Peter smiled vaguely. "The guy _is_ naked," Peter said. "That's a little funny."

Claude hadn't been around for over a week but when he'd shown up at the apartment that day, he'd brought with him the original version of _The Invisible Man _on DVD. Peter did what he could to follow the story without asking too many questions, but one thing he had managed to keep track of from scene to scene was the way the title character gleefully stripped of his fully visible clothes every time he needed to elude the police. It all seemed pretty risqué for a movie from the 1930's.

"Well, I don't think it's funny at all," Claude said, sullenly offended.

"Perhaps you should be reminded of how fortunate you are that your clothes turn invisible with the rest of you," Mohinder remarked from where he sat, bent over some notebook at his desk. "Think of all the infectious diseases you could have died from if you'd been forced to run around New York in the nude." He glanced up at Claude over the top of his glasses.

"Quiet, you," Claude replied without looking away from the screen. "You decided not to watch, remember? Therefore, you don't get to participate in the heckling.'

Mohinder raised an eyebrow. "You know, it's really quite difficult to imagine how we managed to do without you this past week," he commented.

"Just not the same with all that peace and quiet, is it?" Claude replied. "Probably wondered what it was you used to do with yourselves before that serendipitous chain of events that brought me into your lives all those weeks ago."

Claude said this with the expected amount of sarcasm but, in truth, Peter had found himself wondering that very thing more than once during the time that Claude had been gone. Sitting alone at the coffee place every morning with only his newspaper for company, he'd found himself strangely aware of the fact that Claude wasn't with him. Usually people he didn't see on a regular basis (at least, the ones from his new life) had a habit of slipping Peter's mind as if they were a set of keys and he'd forgotten where he'd left them. But the emptiness of his days without the invisible man made it impossible not to feel Claude's absence.

Without Claude around to distract him, Peter had been free to dwell on the dreams that had become increasingly frequent and vivid since his talk with Nathan. Knowing now that the image of himself jumping over the side of a building was real, he'd begun to wonder about the second vision--the one where he was thrown over the edge against his will. Was that real too? Or was his mind just inventing some new scenario to protect him from the horror of the knowledge that he'd once tried to kill himself? Originally, Peter had assumed the latter but as the nights wore on and the dreams began to bleed into his waking life, he started examining the situation more closely until there were nights when he could almost see the face of the person whose hand it was grabbing him by the shoulder, pushing him over the side. If only he could pause the dream at that exact moment and see who it was.

Not that the idea that someone had tried to kill him was anymore comforting than the idea that he'd once tried to kill himself. But it was something. With Simone Deveaux and Isaac Mendez dead, it could very well be the last key to his missing past. One that Nathan himself couldn't keep Peter from seeking out.

"Can people see you in the snow, Claude?" Molly asked after a while. The movie was nearing its finale. On screen, the police had cornered the invisible man inside a barn in the middle of a blizzard.

"I still have footprints, if that's what you're asking," Claude said.

"Yeah, but if it's snowing out, wouldn't people be able to see the snow sticking to you?" she asked. "In your hair and on your clothes?"

"Christ's sake," Claude muttered.

"No, it's a good question," Mohinder said, once again lured away from his work. "If, for example, someone was to throw a bag of flour over you while you were invisible, would they be able to see you or would the flour turn invisible with you?"

"I imagine they'd be too busy getting the shit kicked out of them to find out," Claude replied mildly. "In case you were thinking of testing that theory out."

"I wasn't, but I'll keep that in mind," Mohinder said. "I just can't help but wonder at the nature of your invisibility. As Molly pointed out, it's not as though you're forced to run around in the nude the way the character in the movie is. It's not just your body that turns invisible, but your clothes as well. Things you touch. Perhaps you could even do it to other people."

"Hadn't thought about it," Claude said.

"But what does it mean that you can do that?" Mohinder wondered. "It makes it seem like your invisibility is more like some kind of field you're able to draw up around yourself. That is, a curtain or a veil you're able to pull things under rather than some sort of bodily emission that covers you on reflex."

Mohinder was really warming up to his subject now.

"Sorry, but did you just use the phrase 'bodily emission' in front of a small child?" Claude asked, throwing a look of exaggerated concern at an oblivious Molly.

Mohinder narrowed his eyes. "It's just interesting, that's all."

"It is what it is, mate," Claude said. "I'm not in the habit of questioning it much anymore."

Rolling his eyes, Mohinder met Peter's gaze. "What do you think, Peter?"

Peter shifted uncomfortably. Content to view conversations between Mohinder and Claude strictly as a spectator sport, he hadn't expected to be drawn in like this. "I think we're missing the end of the movie," was all he could think to say, returning his attention to the screen. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mohinder and Claude exchange looks.

"Is that him? Is that the real Claude Rains?" Molly whispered in the final moments of the movie as, for the first time, the face of the invisible man appeared before them.

"What do you mean the 'real Claude Rains'?" Claude asked, poking Molly in the side as the movie ended. "Are you trying to say I'm not real?"

"Does anyone feel like eating?" Mohinder interrupted before Molly could respond.

Peter looked out the window and noticed for the first time that the day was darkening into evening.

"A nice filet mignon might do, if you're offering," Claude replied.

Mohinder narrowed his eyes. "I was thinking more along the lines of Chinese takeaway," he said. "I don't suppose you'd like to stay and eat with us?"

"Is that an invitation or a threat?" Claude asked.

But Mohinder was already up and reaching for his coat. He took Molly's down off the rack as well, holding it out to her.

"Molly, why don't you come with me?" he said.

She hopped off the couch without protest, taking her coat and putting on her shoes. When she was done, Mohinder turned to Peter and Claude, who hadn't moved from their places on opposite ends of the couch. "Any special requests?" he asked.

"Just the usual," Peter said.

Mohinder raised an eyebrow. "And what's the usual?"

"Pop quiz," Claude said under his breath. "Hurry, you're on a timer." He began making ticking noises with his tongue.

"The moo goo gai pan and an egg roll," Peter replied easily.

"Fuck's sake," Claude said, making a face. "Do people actually eat moo goo gai pan? All that white stuff--"

"That's quite all right," Mohinder said, holding up a hand to forestall Claude.

"I wasn't going to go there," Claude said, bristling. "Anyway, it's the sesame chicken for me as long as you're taking orders."

"Good," Mohinder said. "We should be back in about an hour."

He threw a significant look at Claude before leaving with Molly. Peter and Claude were left alone in the apartment.

"Well, that was about as subtle as a bad romantic comedy," Claude said.

"Or a bad horror movie," Peter said, getting up from the couch and moving to the kitchen where he began pulling out plates and silverware. Claude followed but didn't help, choosing instead to watch Peter with a mildly incredulous look on his face.

"Tell me you're not actually setting the table for Chinese takeaway," he said. "I thought the whole point of takeaway was that you didn't have to set the table."

Peter gave him a look but didn't reply.

"You've been doing that a lot today, you know."

"Doing what?"

"Giving me nasty looks and not saying anything," Claude said. "I'm beginning to feel like I ran over your dog or something."

Peter sighed, letting go of a napkin he'd been in the process of folding and letting it fall to the floor.

"Where did you go?" he asked, hating himself for how pathetic the question sounded.

"I was around," Claude replied awkwardly. Then, apparently seeing that this wasn't a satisfactory answer, he added, "I had some…things to work out. On my own."

"Like what?" Peter asked, resting his hands on the back of one of the chairs.

"Like…," Claude began, coming up short. He sighed. "The fact of the matter is, there's something I need to talk to you about."

"I figured."

"How's that?" Claude asked.

"Mohinder could have just called and had the food delivered like he always does," Peter said. "He left us alone for a reason. What's going on?"

Claude shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Remember that day when I was pretending to hypnotize you and you went all Scarlett O'Hara on us and nearly fell off Suresh's couch?" he said.

Peter nodded, pressing his lips together even as, for a brief flash, his mind brought him back onto that roof, wind blowing in his hair.

"You saw something that day," Claude said, coming closer now, creeping around the table. "And I think I know what it is you saw."

Even as he said it, Peter was already lost in the vision. It didn't take much anymore, given that he'd practically been living inside the dream for the past week. He'd memorized every corner of that nightmare, agonized to know what it was that had brought him to that place. What had made him want to jump. And just for a second, he always felt he could take that one crucial moment and, instead of stepping into thin air, he could make himself turn back. But he could never quite make it happen. He couldn't make any of it less real.

He was even getting used to the way the dream would shift like a kaleidoscope turning to form a new picture in his head. He was still on a roof but now he wasn't alone. The back of his throat ached like he'd just been in some kind of shouting match. And then the second person was there, looming over him. Rough fingers dug into his skin, hauling him up. A brief glimpse of the person's face--leering dangerously--and then he was falling. Hurtling toward the ground, the wind whistling in his ears, helpless screams ripping themselves from his throat. Below him, he saw a parked cab and he knew he was headed straight for it, that he was going to hit it and he wasn't going to survive.

Nathan's voice: _The important thing isn't that you jumped, Peter…The important thing is that you survived. Think about it. _

He didn't want to die.

Just as the vision was about to complete itself, Peter was back in the kitchen at Mohinder's apartment. Claude had grabbed him by the shoulder with one hand and was trying to cover his mouth with the other. Peter realized he was still screaming in anticipation of colliding with that parked cab and that Claude was trying to silence him.

"Christ, what was that?" Claude asked when Peter had managed to stop himself from crying out, sounding not a little shaken as he searched Peter's eyes. They were standing close enough that Peter could feel the other man's breath on his face.

For a moment, they just stood like that, frozen.

Then it began to slowly dawn on Peter that something about the vision had been different this time around. This time, he'd done more than catch a glimpse of the face of the man throwing him to his death. This time he'd seen it and he knew who it was.

"It was you," Peter said, voice a quivering whisper.

"Fucking hell, we'll be lucky if someone doesn't phone the police after that," Claude said as if Peter hadn't spoken. He reached around, pulling out a chair and trying to push Peter into it. Peter resisted. "What happened?"

"You threw me over the side of a building," Peter said. He twisted out of Claude's grasp and circled around so that the table was between them. "You threw me over the side of a building!"

Claude blinked, his expression smoothing into a shocked kind of blankness like someone who'd been backhanded without provocation. "What did you say?" he said.

"You heard me," Peter said, slowly backing toward the door.

"But you…," Claude said, lost for the second time in as many minutes. "You shouldn't know that."

Bile rose in Peter's throat. "You tried to kill me," he said, his voice hoarse from screaming. "I saw you do it. It's…It's in my head."

"Hang on just a second," Claude said, holding up a placating hand. "I think maybe you're getting your wires crossed here. Which is scary, considering I didn't know you had wires to cross in the first place. I never--"

"Is that why you're here?" Peter asked. "Is that why you've been here the whole time? It didn't work the first time, so now you're going to try again. Is that it?"

Claude's jaw slackened in open incredulity. "You've got to be joking," he said. "Christ, only you could twist something like that into some kind of murder conspiracy. I marvel at your talent for getting things so completely, ridiculously wrong. I really do."

They stared at each other a moment.

"If I'd wanted to kill you, I wouldn't have suffered the annoyance of your companionship all this time just to gain your trust first," Claude said after a moment. Strangely, the words almost sounded like a greeting card coming from him. "I just would have done it."

In a sick way, Peter wanted to believe him. Maybe part of him did.

But then his back came up against the door, the knob pressing into his side. Claude took a tentative step toward him. Rather than be trapped where he stood, Peter instead chose to run. Pounding down the stairs, his heart racing in his chest, he heard Claude shout after him, the other man's footsteps behind his as he pounded down the stairs. But he didn't turn or even pause long enough to figure out where he was going. All he knew was that he had to get away. Away from the place that had become his home. Away from the people he'd come to trust. Away from the man who'd become his friend. Because even if Claude denied that he'd once tried to kill Peter, there was one thing he didn't deny and that was that he'd been there, on that roof with Peter in the first place.

Either way, it had all been lies.


	13. Chapter 13

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 13/17**

Claude watched Peter disappear down the busy sidewalk with a slight sense of unreality. When Suresh had left with the obvious hint that Claude should get on with the plan to tell Peter the truth, it wasn't like he'd expected things to end well. But this? Clearly, he was being punished. All the past wrongdoings he'd been building up over the years, it was no wonder karma had come to collect at last. Kicking him in the balls at exactly the worst moment.

And it wasn't even like Claude had much of a defense against the accusation that he'd once thrown Peter over the side of a building. The fact that he hadn't been actively trying to kill Peter at the time was really beside the point considering how it had all been two birds with one stone to him when Peter had ended up dying anyway. That he hadn't stayed dead just complicated things more when the boy had nothing but unhelpful fragments of memories to guide him, moments without context given to misinterpretation. Peter, of course, being the champion of misinterpretation.

Except it occurred to Claude as he trudged up the stairs back to Suresh's flat that there shouldn't have even been anything for Peter to misinterpret. Years had passed since Claude had last dealt with the Haitian but even back then he'd had a reputation for being a thorough bastard. It wasn't like he had a habit of leaving shards of unwanted memories just lying about for his victims and clients to trip over like Peter was doing now. Was the fact that Peter remembered even these small scraps a sign that he was beginning to somehow push through the barriers of amnesia? Or was something else going on?

With nothing to do but lurk until Suresh and Molly got back, Claude set about distracting himself from his thoughts by finishing what Peter had started with setting the table. He debated for a bit over whether he should include a fourth place what with Peter probably halfway to Mexico by now but did it anyway just in case. Before long, he heard the jangle of keys in the lock.

Suresh appeared in the doorway with a large bag of greasy food in one hand and Molly's hand in the other. The two entered the flat apprehensively as if the funereal silence had led them to believe they were about to stumble on the aftermath of some violent scene. But Peter hadn't left any signs of his anger behind him this time. Quite the change from back when he used to be able to throw objects across the room using only his mind.

"He isn't here," Claude said once Suresh's eyes had fallen on him, standing guiltily next to the table, which felt ridiculous to him now that it was all set like they were about to have a nice family dinner. "He's run off."

Suresh set the bag of food down on the table wordlessly. Meanwhile, Molly moved between the open bedroom door and the open bathroom door, looking inside each room as if she didn't believe Peter was really gone.

"I suppose he didn't take it very well," Suresh said after a minute and it was obvious from his tone that even he was aware of the magnitude of his own understatement.

"That's the thing," Claude said. "He didn't take it at all."

Suresh straightened, a faintly accusatory look on his face. "What did you do?" he asked.

"I didn't try to molest him or anything, if that's what you think," Claude said. Except he couldn't help but wonder if that was entirely true. After all, he'd had to press himself pretty close to the boy to get him to stop all that flailing and screaming. And he hadn't exactly been quick to move away. Not until Peter had pushed him.

Claude shifted his weight to the other foot. "He thinks I tried to kill him."

"When?" Suresh asked. "Just now?"

"No, not just now," Claude said, annoyed. "Back then. When I threw him over the side of that building."

Suresh's narrowed eyes widened in surprise. "He remembered?" he said. "Should that even be possible?"

"I don't know," Claude said. "All I know is he went into one of those fits like he did that day we played at hypnotizing him. Except this time it wasn't just staring off into space and falling off couches. This time it was all thrashing about and screaming bloody murder. Like he was caught in some kind of a nightmare."

"Or a vision," Suresh said. "Like the prophetic dreams he used to have."

Claude shuddered, remembering how it was one of those prophetic dreams that had led Peter to him in the first place. "Except this was a memory," Claude said. "Or a fragment of a memory. He didn't understand what he was seeing."

"But he saw you," Suresh said carefully. "So he knows he knew you. Before."

"Guess so," Claude said.

A pause passed between them as they each absorbed this fact.

"Fucking Petrelli," Claude said. "This is his fault, I'm sure of it. All his shit about 'honoring Peter's wishes.' If only we'd all told him the truth in the first place, he wouldn't be out there on his own right now thinking--" He cut himself off with effort.

"We couldn't have known that this was going to happen," Suresh said grimly.

"We could have made an educated guess," Claude said. "The boy has a history, after all."

Suresh's mouth quirked up ever so slightly at that.

"We need to find him," Claude said.

"How long ago did he leave?" Suresh asked.

"Don't know," Claude said. "Wasn't exactly looking at a clock at the time. Maybe a half hour or so." It was a wild guess. Peter could have been gone for hours for all he knew. "I should have run after him but I thought chasing him would only add to the whole perception he has now that I'm some sort of crazed serial killer."

"I think that was the right choice, all things considered," Suresh said. "Which is also why I think you should stay here while I go looking for him."

Claude's jaw slackened. "Like hell," he said.

"Claude--"

"I'm not going to sit around here wringing my hands while you're out performing some kind of one-man search party," Claude pressed on. "How do you expect to find him anyway? He could be anywhere by now."

"I could help."

The offer came from Molly, who had been standing off to the side as Suresh and Claude argued. She looked hopeful, eager to contribute. It was all Claude could do not to sweep her up in his arms and crush the breath out of her. If he was the sort that did that type of thing with children. Which he wasn't.

"No," Suresh said immediately. "You should stay here with Claude."

Claude exchanged looks with the little girl.

"But I want to help," she said. "I can find Peter."

Suresh sighed. He crouched down so that he was eye level with Molly. "I know you can, Molly," he said. "I appreciate your offer and I know how much you want Peter to be safe. But Peter isn't himself right now. He's scared. Reminding him that no matter where he runs we'll be able to find him using your power will only scare him more. Not to mention how dangerous it might be for you considering you found Claude for us just a few days ago."

Molly threw a glance at Claude suggesting her bitterness at her own generosity. He knew she was thinking if only she'd known this was what was going to happen, she wouldn't have bothered locating him in the first place.

"I just think it's better if we do things the old-fashioned way this time," Suresh added. "I'm sorry."

"Claude's right," Molly said, angry tears glistening in her eyes. "You should have just told him the truth all along." With that, she turned on her heel and disappeared into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Suresh watched her go, looking pained.

"I don't understand why we can't just use her ability," Claude said. "That's what it's there for, isn't it? Finding people and all that."

"Peter's trust is fragile right now," Suresh said, standing again. "Or perhaps non-existent is the better word. I know of a few places he might have gone to. I'll check there first. If I don't find him by morning, we'll have Molly look."

"He could be dead by morning," Claude pointed out.

"Then we'll all be dead by afternoon because that's how long it will take Nathan Petrelli to figure out what's going on," Suresh said wryly. "Before I go, I have just one question."

"I already told you I didn't try to molest him," Claude said. This time he almost believed himself.

"Not that," Suresh said, rolling his eyes. "These…fits Peter's been having. Is that normal? For someone who's had an encounter with the Haitian, I mean."

"Well, I haven't done any extensive studies or anything," Claude said.

"But, to your knowledge, do the people he comes into contact with suffer any kind of brain damage that might result in seizures like the two Peter's had?"

"Seizures, maybe," Claude said. "Memories, never. It doesn't work like that." He shifted. "And by the way this isn't doing anything to help convince me of your little theory that Peter will be fine by himself until morning."

"I just wonder what it means," Suresh said.

"Join the club, mate," Claude said.

Suresh nodded. "I should get started," he said. "I'll call if I find anything."

And with that, Suresh was out the door and it was just him and Molly to wait and see what happened next.

TBC


	14. Chapter 14

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 14/17**

Peter's last clear memory of his old apartment was of the party he'd thrown there to celebrate his graduation from nursing school, the same night of Nathan's crash. A year had passed since then but in the dust that had gathered in his absence he could still see evidence of himself having been there more recently than that, from the half-used bar of soap in the bathroom to the October issue of _TV Guide _sitting open on the coffee table. Nathan had kept up the rent on the place for him in the hope that Peter would someday be able to live on his own again despite his frequent memory lapses. And the place did hold a certain familiarity--more so sometimes than Mohinder's apartment for all that it was a relic from the remembered part of his former life. But nothing about it felt like home to him anymore. Standing in it, he felt like a stranger trespassing on the ghostly territory of his forgotten self.

He'd come here with the intention of packing a suitcase and making his way to the nearest train station or airport but once inside, he couldn't keep himself from lingering a moment, reflecting on all that he'd lost. Stuffed in a drawer in the dresser were unframed pictures of his family and friends. He pulled them out in piles, flipping through them, looking for the unfamiliar faces. But in the people he didn't recognize he didn't find a woman who might be Simone Deveaux or a man who might be her boyfriend, Isaac. He didn't find Claude. Mostly the pictures were of himself and Nathan at varying ages, all taken at events that were firmly planted in the more stable part of Peter's memory: Nathan's wedding, Peter's high school graduation, their father's last birthday, Christmas a few years ago, the hospital just after each of Nathan's kids were born. These were the memories he'd gotten to keep.

The ones that were lost to him were represented mostly in hints he'd left himself around the room. On a notepad next to the unmade bed he found scribbled in his own handwriting over and over a mysterious phrase: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." A crumpled newspaper by the couch carried the story of Nathan's public acknowledgement of Peter's suicide attempt. A copy of the book Mohinder's father had written peeked out of an old messenger bag.

The book Mohinder's father had written.

Peter paused, staring at the book from across the room. Covered in plastic, there was a bar code on the front that indicated it had come from the library. Picking it up, a small receipt fell out from between the pages, fluttering to the floor. He bent to retrieve the scrap of paper and saw that it was a reminder of the book's due date: October of last year.

His first thought was of the massive overdue fines he must have accrued in his time away. His second was to wonder what the he'd been doing with Dr. Suresh's book way back in October.

Maybe he'd been researching what he'd known back then of Nathan's ability to fly. But the large collection of notes stuck between the pages seemed too elaborate for idle curiosity. He flipped through the assorted cryptic messages he'd left himself, hastily scribbled comments like, "Human flight…develops in adulthood?" and "Nakamura--time teleportation." "Save the cheerleader, save the world" made several more appearances.

Sitting down with the book in hand, he started from the beginning, reading the text and following along with the notes he'd written. The urgency of his situation forgotten, time slid by as he paged through the volume, attempting to figure out what he'd been trying to tell himself back then and why. Had he known he was going to lose his memory? Was this some kind of last ditch effort to preserve his knowledge? If so, he really could have done a better job writing things that might actually have made sense upon re-reading.

About halfway through the book, he paused. At this point, the notes he found no longer belonged just to himself--someone else's handwriting had intruded on his. Had, in fact, trampled over his in some places. The second person's writing was cramped and sloppy, the messages taunting rather than enlightening or helpful. "Peter Petrelli is a great bloody git" was scrawled across one page. "Nathan Petrelli cheats at children's board games" was on another. There was even one that said, "Angela Petrelli makes small babies cry." These mild, uninspired insults were littered throughout, all of them aimed at Peter or a member of his family.

It didn't take much to guess just who might have written these things but it was still a shock to Peter when he flipped to a chapter speculating on the psychological consequences of having a special ability and saw a note in the margin, written straight on the page rather than a sticky note like the others. "Claude Rains, Invisible Man, 193?," it read. "Your invisible friend says look it up!" The note was signed with a barely legible name: _Claude._

Peter ran his fingers over the words, feeling the indent the press of the pen had made on the page. And of course it was pen because Claude wasn't really the type to deface public property in pencil just to avoid getting charged for damage. Peter wondered if he had seen this before, if he had noticed any of Claude's added commentary before he'd forgotten Claude altogether. Was it really possible that he'd been stupid enough to let the invisible man--the man who had tried to kill him--get close to him not once but twice?

Eyes getting tired as the morning began to creep in, Peter lifted the book closer to his face to better see the blurring words on its pages. As he did, a few leafs in the back arched off the cover and a piece of paper slipped out from underneath.

What now?

Picking the paper up from where it had fallen on the floor, Peter was able to focus his vision enough to see the address written there. He lingered over it, re-reading the street name and apartment number several times before something clicked in his mind and he realized it wasn't just any address he was looking at. It was Mohinder's address. Safely kept here among all these other scraps of information he hadn't seen or touched since at least November.

Mouth dry, mind reeling, he almost didn't hear the knock on the door when it came. Light and unthreatening, it repeated itself several times while Peter held his breath, willing his visitor to go away.

"Peter?" Mohinder's voice came through the thick wood. Peter dropped the piece of paper with the address on it as if touching it had somehow brought Mohinder here. "It's Mohinder Suresh." Because he always felt the need to specify both his first and last names, as if Peter might forget or as if he was still trying to separate himself from his father. "If you're in there, please open the door. Peter?"

Peter shifted, his movement knocking the book on his lap to the floor with a loud thump. He winced but didn't go to the door.

"I heard that," Mohinder observed dryly. "I'm alone, if that helps."

Peter didn't move.

Mohinder heaved a sigh, audible even through the door. "Claude told me what happened," he said. "I know I can't possibly understand the confusion you must be feeling right now. But I have answers for you. Things you deserve to know. Things I should have told you from the beginning."

Slowly, Peter unfolded himself from where he sat on the floor. He opened the door, chain lock still in place, and peered out at Mohinder from behind it.

"I have your address written down in an old library copy of your father's book," he said by way of greeting. "Why? Did we know each other before?"

Slightly taken aback by the abruptness of Peter's question, Mohinder managed to nod just once. "We did," he said.

Peter felt the urge to slam the door in Mohinder's face but didn't.

"When?" he asked.

"We met back in late September or early October," Mohinder said. "I had just come to New York and was following up on some research my father left after his death. I came across a lead that brought me to your brother. What happened after that is a long story involving my shouting at him like a lunatic in public and being carried off by armed bodyguards but eventually that encounter with Nathan led me to you. Or, rather, it led you to me." He swallowed. "You showed up on my doorstep wanting to discuss my father's work. Just as you did a second time more recently. The time that you remember."

Mohinder told the story carefully, eyeing Peter and monitoring his reaction closely. Peter listened and absorbed the information. None of it meant anything to him but somehow it was enough that he unhooked the chain on the door and stepped aside in wordless invitation, allowing Mohinder to enter his apartment.

Once inside, Mohinder looked around the cramped space with interest, taking in the sight of the posters on the walls and the books on the floor. He caught sight of the notepad that had been moved from the table beside Peter's bed to the table in front of the couch and picked it up, his lips moving slightly as he read to himself the message Peter had written about the mysterious cheerleader.

"This isn't the first time you've been here," Peter guessed as an almost nostalgic look passed over Mohinder's face.

"No," Mohinder said, the admission coming more easily than Peter had expected. "I actually didn't know for sure that you still had this place. I came here as a last resort."

For the first time, Peter noticed Mohinder's somewhat haggard appearance and realized the other man must have been up all night, roaming the city, looking for him.

"The last time I was here, I had come to make amends," Mohinder said. "That is, I was feeling guilty about the way I'd treated you when you'd first introduced yourself to me as…as someone with a personal interest in my father's research. You see, I hadn't yet had any personal experience with the reality of special abilities in humans, so I was naturally a bit skeptical. I was not as open as I should have been to the information you were trying to give me at the time."

Mohinder continued to speak carefully but not as though he expected Peter to jump in and start filling in the blanks at any minute. Instead, he seemed to be allowing for the fact that Peter no longer had any connection to the idea of a Mohinder who didn't welcome him into his home the way he had that second time. The time Peter could remember.

"You couldn't give me any evidence to support the claims you were making and so I turned you away," Mohinder went on. "But in the days that followed, certain events took place that led me to question whether I'd made the right decision. Before I could decide whether or not to approach you, your brother found me. It turned out that you had been through some traumatic experiences of your own since I'd last seen you and he believed you were getting ready to flee. He wanted me to help him stop you."

Peer raised an eyebrow at this but said nothing.

"We formed a somewhat unlikely alliance that led the both of us here." He indicated Peter's apartment. "Your brother tried to get you to listen but I'm afraid after our earlier encounter, my presence hindered his attempt rather than aided it. You, on the other hand, were quite impressive. You managed to lull your brother into a false sense of security and then promptly made a run for it."

Peter felt his eyes widen at his own, unremembered audacity. "I did not," he said. "Did I?"

"You did," Mohinder said. "We both went after you but by the time we reached the hallway you were already gone." His expression darkened somewhat and he hesitated. "The window was open. We thought you'd--" He cut himself off.

Peter smiled darkly. "You thought I'd jumped." He was beginning to wonder if there were any stories about his former life that didn't end with him taking leaps from tall buildings.

"No," Mohinder said. "We thought you'd flown.

A deafening silence rang suddenly in Peter's ears.

"What?" he said, a sharp edge to his voice.

"We thought you'd flown out the window," Mohinder said. "Like Nathan can fly. In fact, I continued to believe that until recently when I found out the truth."

"Which is what?" Peter asked, incredulous.

"Claude," Mohinder said. "He was there that day. He told me he caught you on your way out and hid you from Nathan and me. We ran right past you without any idea that you were there." He swallowed. "You were invisible, Peter. The both of you were invisible."

"Claude…turned me invisible?" Peter asked, struggling to understand.

"No," Mohinder said. "You were invisible." A significant pause. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Peter considered carefully. He flexed his fingers, looking down at them as if they might disappear before his eyes. The idea seemed impossible to him and yet what Mohinder was suggesting felt strangely close. More close than anything Peter had been told about his past life so far.

"Peter, when you came to me the second time around, you wanted to discuss with me my father's work and how it related to your suspicions about your brother's powers," Mohinder said. "But the first time you came to me it was because you were having suspicions about your own powers. More than suspicions, actually. You wanted to discuss with me the experiences you had been having."

Peter shook his head helplessly. "You're wrong," he said.

"I'm not," Mohinder said.

"You have it wrong," Peter insisted more forcefully.

"I don't," Mohinder replied with equal force. "I've lied to you long enough, thinking you would stumble on the truth on your own. That you would discover your powers all over again the way you did the first time. But you haven't and given the recent turn of events, I thought it was time for me to tell you what I know."

Peter swallowed. "So you're saying I can turn invisible _and_ fly or just that you thought I could fly and found out I could turn invisible?" he asked.

"I'm saying you can do both," Mohinder said. "And much more. You can fly because your brother flies. You can turn invisible because Claude does. You can also draw the future, heal yourself from grievous injuries, dream prophetically, read people's thoughts, move objects with your mind…the list goes on. Even I don't know the full extent of it."

Peter shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Except I can't do any of that," he said.

"You can," Mohinder said. "I've seen you do it. It's just that you've forgotten how."

Peter's thoughts felt like they were moving in slow motion. Like somewhere in this conversation he'd lost the ability to actually understand anything Mohinder was saying.

"Claude has a word for a person of your talent," Mohinder said.

"Empath," Peter said, remembering it only as he said it, unsure why it had stuck with him. The idea had seemed like a myth to him when Claude had first told him about it. It just hadn't seemed possible that someone could be that powerful. And now Mohinder was telling him…

"An empath, yes," Mohinder said. "That's what you are. You absorb the abilities of others. Not unlike a sponge."

He sensed that Mohinder was about to go into his professorial lecture mode and raised a hand to stop him. "Why should I believe you?" he asked. "You've been lying to me this whole time. You acted like I'd never met you before when you know all this stuff about me. You've seen me do all these things. Why should I trust you now?"

"Perhaps you shouldn't," Mohinder said wearily. "I leave that decision entirely up to you. But before you make it, there's something you should know."

"And what would that be?"

"Your memories," Mohinder said. "I understand you've been having visions of Claude throwing you off of a rooftop. That you believe he once tried to kill you and may still be after you."

"Yeah," Peter said.

"Then you should know that, as I understand it, your memory of Claude throwing you is real," Mohinder said. "But I don't believe he meant to kill you."

"Then why did he do it?"

Mohinder sighed. "I'm afraid you'll have to ask him that," he said. He pulled something out of the pocket of his jacket, a scrap of paper with something neatly printed on one side. "I brought this in case you needed more convincing than I was prepared to give, which I'm sure you do."

Peter took the paper. On it was written another address, this one unfamiliar to him.

"Isaac Mendez's loft," Mohinder said by way of explanation.

"Isaac Mendez," Peter repeated slowly. "Simone Deveaux's boyfriend." He looked up. "I thought he was dead."

"He is," Mohinder said. "He was murdered a few months back. When he died, you were able to take over the rent on his loft. You felt it was important to preserve Mendez's work and, I believe, wished to use his work space for your own projects. This according to your brother who, I might add, warned me never to let you go there if you did happen to remember that it existed." He cleared his throat. "I believe at this point Claude would insert some sarcastic comment on just how far your family's fortune stretches given that you're able to keep up the rent on so many living spaces in this city. I'll refrain from doing the same but I thought it was important to let you know I'm secretly thinking it."

Peter smiled briefly at this. "Just one thing," he said. "What would I need a work space like that for? I'm not a painter."

"Perhaps not," Mohinder said. "But you had to get your ability to draw the future from somewhere." He nodded toward the paper with Isaac Mendez's address. "I believe this is it."

Peter took a moment to consider this. Mohinder rocked on his heels a little and it seemed the conversation had exhausted itself.

"I really should be going," he said. "I've left Molly alone with Claude all night while I looked for you. Probably not one of my better ideas."

Peter couldn't think of anything to say to this.

"You don't have to come back," Mohinder said. "I'll understand if you don't. But just promise me you'll at least go there." He indicated the piece of paper Peter held.

"I will," Peter said. "Thank you."


	15. Chapter 15

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 15/17**

Claude had been in Isaac Mendez's loft exactly once in his life--a field trip with Peter during which they'd watched from secret corners as Simone Deveaux made fools of both him and her painter boyfriend, proving Claude's point that she was, in fact, just like "all the rest." There hadn't been much time to sightsee back then but lurking invisibly a respectable distance behind the boy as he wandered about among the paintings, all hushed like someone in a museum or church, Claude was able to appreciate the exact scope of Mendez's talent for capturing the future, especially now that it was all past.

Among the many grisly scenes Mendez had predicted so accurately, Claude searched for the one painting that hadn't completely escaped his notice the first time around but didn't see it anywhere. Most of the paintings that featured Peter showed him as some sort of awkward secret identity without a superhero persona to back it up--all long limbs, wide eyes and floppy hair. But there had been that one piece that showed him in a moment of triumph--lifting himself into the air, arms spread out like wings, a slight smirk on his face. The sole piece of evidence that Peter's forgotten past hadn't all been violence and gore. So of course it was nowhere to be found, no matter how many times Claude looked.

And unfortunately, invisibility wasn't much of a cover when the silence of the loft made even the squeak of his shoes on the floor sound like gunfire. So it wasn't much of a surprise when, without turning, Peter addressed the thin air around him as he gestured toward a particular painting that had captured his interest.

"I don't get this one," he said.

Without coming out from under his veil of invisibility, Claude walked up behind Peter and took a closer look. In the painting, he saw Peter sitting on the sidewalk next to a demolished cab. Half his leg appeared to be missing but not as though it had been cut off. Instead it seemed to fade from sight below the knee. The boy looked stunned by whatever it was that had just happened. Claude recognized that look. He placed the moment easily.

"You know that vision you keep having of me throwing you over the side of a building?"

Peter didn't answer. Maybe he thought Claude was switching channels on him.

"Well, that's the aftermath there."

"The aftermath?" Peter asked.

"Aye," Claude said. "You managed to impale yourself on an innocent taxi cab. Christ, you were livid with me after that."

Peter winced, pressing down slightly on his torso through his shirt as if checking to make sure it was all still there. "Impaling myself on a cab doesn't exactly sound like something I would have the chance to be livid about afterward," he said.

Claude chose that moment to make himself visible and, as if sensing this, Peter looked over his shoulder at him. The boy did his best to appear calm as he faced the man he'd only recently accused of trying to murder him but they were standing close enough that Claude imagined he could hear the thud of Peter's heart against his ribcage. His feet shuffled restlessly as if he was barely resisting the urge to run again.

"Thing is, I wasn't trying to kill you that night," Claude said. "Don't get me wrong. If you did happen to die, it wasn't any skin off my back. But I wasn't trying to kill you."

"Then what were you trying to do?" Peter asked.

"I was trying to make you fly, you idiot," Claude said. "Up to then you'd only managed to hover a bit and that was only when you were around your big brother. You were proving to be especially daft when it came to accessing your powers without the person who'd given you that power in the first place standing close by. We were working on a time schedule, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and toss you off into the deep end. So to speak." He cleared his throat. "Except you didn't swim like I thought you would. You just soft of…floated." Claude could feel the metaphor falling apart on him even as he said it.

"Floated?" Peter asked.

"Aye, equally effective when trying not to drown but not exactly the result I was looking for," Claude said. "Also, the heartfelt speech you gave me afterward about holding on to your feelings about your benefactors in order to access their powers was pretty sickening. But then, I'm not really the kind to have warm fuzzies about high school cheerleaders."

"Save the cheerleader, save the world," Peter said.

"Yes, we've all heard it a dozen times," Claude said. "She's the one who gave you the power to heal, in case you were wondering why you didn't stay dead that night." He eyed the painting of Peter's dead body laying beneath the homecoming sign while the cheerleader girl hovered in the background.

"So I…died the night I fell on that cab?" Peter asked.

"Yeah," Claude said. "And once before that. A couple of times since then as well. Once in front of Suresh, in fact."

"Jesus," Peter muttered. "So I can't die?"

"You don't have to sound so disappointed," Claude said. "Anyway, I don't know that you can't die, especially considering your current state of forgetfulness. I just know that back then you couldn't be killed by your own or any other hand. Chances are you could probably still get sick like anyone else but my opinion is if you can survive turning into a nuclear explosion, you can survive just about anything."

Claude didn't realize what he'd said until Peter's eyes widened and his jaw dropped just slightly.

"Guess Suresh didn't mention that, then," Claude said. He smiled weakly. "Surprise."

"The bomb," Peter said. He looked down at the floor, the mural of New York engulfed in flames. "That was me."

"You told me you thought being an empath might just be a bit dangerous," Claude said solemnly. "You were right."

"Is that why I don't remember?" Peter asked and from his weary tone Claude could guess that he was getting tired of having to ask that question all the time. "Because I…" He swallowed around the word rather than saying it aloud.

"I've no idea what damage blowing up like that might have done to you, though I've some idea you didn't get away entirely unscathed," Claude said. "But it's not the reason you walk around like a senile old lady, forgetting what your keys are for."

Peter seemed affronted. "I've never been that bad," he said.

"Maybe not, but you've come damn close on more than one occasion," Claude said.

"So I didn't lose my memory in the explosion," Peter said. "I wasn't in an accident. I didn't fall down the damn stairs and hit my head." He pressed his lips together. "What happened to me? Why can't I remember?" He gave Claude a sideways look. "You know. Don't you?"

Claude nodded.

"How did you find out?" Peter asked. "Or is that just something else you've known this entire time without telling me?"

"I had my suspicions," Claude said. "But I didn't know for sure what had happened to you until I sat down for a bit of a chat with your brother that day he was in New York. Just after you left, in fact."

Peter couldn't have looked more dismayed if he was being paid good money to do it.

"Don't look at me like that," Claude said. "I needed answers, didn't I?"

"And I don't?" Peter snapped with no small amount of bitterness in his voice.

"You didn't lose your memory. It was taken from you," Claude said.

Peter raised his eyebrows. "Well, that was easy," he said. "I was thinking we were going to do a whole song and dance routine where you gave me some lecture about the value of figuring it out on my own."

"Yeah, well, first of all, I'm not your brother," Claude said. "Second, we'd all die of old age waiting for you to come to the answers yourself." At Peter's indignant look, he added, "And for once I'm not talking about your obvious mental deficiencies. I'm talking about the nature of what was done to you. And why it was done."

Peter frowned at this and when he opened his mouth to ask his next question, Claude thought he knew what it would be. He was wrong.

"How did we know each other?" Peter asked. "Before."

Claude filled his chest with a breath, which he held momentarily before speaking.

"You saw me in a vision," he said. "You had some idea about this bomb that was going to blow up the city and you were convinced that you were that bomb. Apparently I was supposed to teach you how to control your powers so you wouldn't explode and take half the population with you. After some consideration, I agreed but you weren't really all that impressed with my teaching methods and I wasn't really all that impressed with your learning methods, so we didn't exactly get around to completing our lessons. Besides that, I thought you'd betrayed me to some people I didn't want finding me. I might have stormed off in something of a huff."

Peter pressed his lips together, clearly finding humor in this image. As if he hadn't done the same thing himself just a few days ago.

"Thing is, it's been going around in my head ever since that if I hadn't walked away you might not have exploded that night," Claude said. He hadn't meant to admit this but something about Peter's silence compelled him to reveal more than what he'd already said.

"Yeah, because we probably would have killed each other before I got the chance," Peter said wryly, a hint of a crooked smile forming in one corner of his mouth. "You threw me over a damn building!"

"Are you still harping on about that?" Claude said. "I swear, you're holding more of a grudge now than you did back when I originally did it."

"I am?" Peter said.

"Well, yeah," Claude said. "But probably only because back then you were too busy being mad about the fact that I had to punch you out in the middle of the street to keep you from going nuclear right in front of me." At Peter's look, he added, "Long story."

Peter turned toward the window. "I wish I could remember."

Claude sighed. "You won't," he said. "That's not the way it works with the Haitian."

"The Haitian?" Peter asked without turning around.

"He's the one took your memories," Claude said.

Peter's shoulders stiffened. The boy was silent for a long moment before asking, "You know what I hate most about all of this?"

"What's that?" Claude asked.

"It's old," Peter replied. "It's past. All I'm really doing is relearning all this stuff I already knew. I'm not moving forward. I'm not making anything…new."

Claude put a hand on Peter's shoulder then in what was meant to be an awkward gesture of comfort. But then the boy turned to face him and Claude leaned toward him and suddenly it all became something more. Something with lips pressed against each other and Claude's hand in Peter's hair and Peter's hands coming round and sliding up Claude's back. The kiss was both searing and strangely tentative: an exploration rather than a declaration. And maybe Suresh wasn't totally wrong. Maybe Claude had thought about it from time to time but when he did he hadn't thought that it would be like this.

Pulling away with obvious reluctance, Peter opened his eyes slowly, looking pleasantly confused.

"There," Claude said, stroking his thumb across Peter's cheek. "That's something new."

TBC

_Thanks once again to those who left such great reviews! The last two parts should be up by the end of the week. I hope you continue to enjoy!_


	16. Chapter 16

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 16/17**

"Peter."

Sitting on a bench in a deserted train station in the middle of the night, Peter looked up at the sound of his name to find Nathan standing there dressed in a brown overcoat and what appeared to be striped pajama bottoms, looking for all the world like a concerned father come to retrieve his kid from his first overnight stay at a friend's house. In a way, that was what this felt like.

"What are you doing here?" Nathan said as he finally reached Peter. "What's this about?"

"I wanted to see you," Peter said, practically feeling the slap upside the head Claude would have delivered at the perceived sentimentality of that statement, had he been there.

But Peter had left Claude back in Isaac Mendez's loft. Following their conversation, he'd felt the sudden and overpowering urge to go somewhere where he could clear his head. Buying the train ticket to Washington had been the easy part. Finding Nathan's place once he was in Washington proved to be more difficult. Nathan had given him the address numerous times but, predictably enough, Peter had forgotten what it was. Without that, he'd been forced to call his brother--whose number he kept stored in his cell phone for the sake of convenience--to come pick him up. Not the least embarrassing way of starting a conversation.

"Are you okay?" Nathan asked, his hand finding Peter's shoulder like it always did when he was worried.

"I will be," Peter said.

For three days, that was the extent of their discussion about the reason behind Peter's unannounced visit. There might have been more but Nathan wasn't completely insensitive to the idea of giving a person some space and, besides that, he was busy at work. Apparently even important, heartfelt conversations with close family members required an appointment first.

While Nathan was doing what he could to rearrange his schedule, Peter was left to the mercy of Heidi, who was as hospitable as possible under the circumstances.

"Nathan misses you, Peter," she said to him at the breakfast table one morning. "He worries about you all the time."

"He doesn't have to," Peter replied.

Heidi gave him a politely skeptical look before sipping her coffee. "He mentioned the idea of bringing you here to live with us," she said. "It would make him feel better if you were close by."

Peter couldn't tell from her tone exactly how she felt about this particular idea, though he could guess that she wasn't wildly enthusiastic about it. He'd learned by now not to take stuff personally when it came to Heidi. It wasn't that they didn't like each other. They actually got along pretty well, considering they were constant competitors for Nathan's attention. But he knew his memory lapses made her nervous and that his living there would make her feel obligated to watch him twenty-four hours a day. In case he couldn't remember what the warning labels on household cleaning products were for and accidentally let her kids drink poison.

For his part, Peter had no desire to spend anymore time in Washington than he had to but it wasn't really like he had any kind of defense against the idea. He had no job or any kind of real life in New York. All he had were the people and he wasn't sure he even had them anymore. Still, he told her, "I have friends back home. I can't leave them."

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Simon had asked eagerly. At he'd just begun noticing girls and was eager to live vicariously through his more experienced acquaintances. Monty screwed up his face, clearly disgusted at his brother's suggestion.

Peter hesitated. "Um, not exactly."

Even as he said it, he felt his cheeks redden at the memory of Claude's kiss. As always, the thought of it set off a slight thrill in the pit of his stomach, like dropping down that first hill on a roller coaster. That it had happened at all still didn't feel quite real to Peter. Maybe it would have had he stuck around long enough for there to be a second round. But despite the slight sense of unreality, Peter also knew that of all the things that had happened to him in the past few weeks, this had been the one thing that made a bizarre sort of sense. The one thing that had given him the feeling of finally moving forward after he'd spent so much time stuck in one place.

It was a direction Peter was eager to explore, a leap he was more than willing to take. But before he could do that, he needed to find the remaining pieces of his lost past. And he needed them to come from Nathan.

Once breakfast was over and the boys were off to school, Peter went to his room where he spent the morning puzzling over a paperback he'd bought to read on the train ride. The story wasn't complicated but he experienced the usual difficulties keeping track of the plot's various movements as he went along. He was about fifty pages in, which was farther than he'd gotten with any book since his memory loss, and he wasn't doing too badly, all things considered. The notes he kept stuck between the pages--an idea copped from his former self's treatment of Dr. Suresh's book--helped a little. It made for slow going, but it made him feel pathetically accomplished.

Just as he was about to clear page sixty, a knock came on the bedroom door.

"Can I come in?"

Nathan.

"Yeah," Peter called back, laying the book open and face down on the night table next to the bed where he was sitting as Nathan came into the room, shutting the door behind him.

"Mind if I sit?" Nathan asked, gesturing to the chair at the desk that had been set up in the corner of the room.

Peter lifted a shoulder. "It's your house," he said.

Nathan rolled his eyes, pulling out the chair and setting it front of the bed so that when Peter pushed himself to the edge of the mattress, they sat squarely facing each other. Nathan settled into place, his expression unusually serious even for him. Peter, on the other hand, couldn't keep a straight face.

"This is too weird," he said.

"What is?" Nathan asked.

"I feel like we're about to have the sex talk all over again," Peter said.

Nathan grimaced. "Jesus, Pete," he said. "If this is your way of trying to break the ice, all I can say is bringing up one of the most awkward experiences of my life isn't really the way to do it."

Peter shrugged. "It wasn't that bad."

But it really had been. Maybe slightly more informative than the fire and brimstone their family pastor had given him at his mother's request, but definitely not worth the embarrassment of sitting through Nathan's awkward lecture about how some kids were getting the "wrong kind of information" off the internet (been there, done that) or from their friends at school (had the t-shirt). The sidebar on the correct use of a condom had made it all just that much more horrifying. The only thing that could have made it worse was a demonstration on a banana, but that particular honor had fallen to Peter's high school health teacher, a lesson from which he had never fully recovered.

"Well, look at it this way--it was good practice for when you have to sit Monty and Simon down to have the same talk with them," he said. At Nathan's thunderous expression, he added, "You know…many, many years from now. Possibly on their wedding days." It went without saying that Nathan wasn't yet fully aware of his older son's blossoming interest in the opposite sex.

"Just for that, I'm making you do it," Nathan said.

"Like hell," Peter said with a snort.

Nathan sighed, looking down at his hands, loosely folded in his lap. The mood in the room shifted palpably.

"What are you doing here, Pete?" he asked. "What's this about?"

It was the exact same question he'd asked in the train station that first night.

Peter hesitated, looking down at the garish floral pattern of the bed's comforter, tracing it with his finger. "I want to meet the Haitian," he said.

For a moment, Nathan's mask of diplomacy slipped and he looked honestly taken aback. He covered his surprise quickly, schooling his expression into carefully practiced neutrality. But his voice was tight when he asked, "Did you remember the Haitian or did someone tell you about him?"

His tone didn't exactly leave any doubt as to who that possible someone might be.

"I didn't remember," Peter admitted.

Something flickered in Nathan's eyes. Something distinctly like betrayal. Stiffly, he asked, "And what else did he tell you?"

"The better question," Peter said, "is what else you told him not to tell me."

For a moment, they sat frowning at each other, matching mild glares before Peter broke away, looking toward a nondescript painting of a basket of fruit on the opposite wall, addressing it instead of his brother.

"Claude mentioned that he had a talk with you while you were in New York," he said. "All he told me was that someone called the Haitian had taken my memories from me. I assumed you would know something about that."

"And what if I do?"

"I want to talk to him," Peter said, repeating his earlier request.

"To what end?" Nathan asked.

"I don't know," Peter said. He looked down at his hands. "It's not just the lapses. I mean, having to write everything down a million times so I won't forget, taking almost the entire day to read the newspaper, not remembering which door is mine in an apartment building full of doors. All of that sucks but I'm learning to deal with it because I know it's probably never going to go away."

Nathan looked pained at this but said nothing.

"I'm sick of people knowing more about me than I know," Peter said. "You. Mohinder. Claude. I feel like I blacked out at some party and did some really embarrassing thing nobody will tell me about." He shook his head. "I know stuff like that can't be fixed. Claude already told me I won't remember. But I at least need to know why."

"And did you ever stop to think maybe it would be better if you didn't know?" Nathan asked. He moved to the edge of his chair, leaning forward so that Peter was forced to look him in the eye. "Peter, I need you to believe that if I didn't tell you about the Haitian or anything else about that missing time before, it's because I had good reason not to. You have to trust me."

"I do trust you," Peter said. "But I want this. I'm sure."

Nathan looked unconvinced.

Peter bit his lip. "I know why I jumped that day," he said, playing his last card. "Claude didn't tell me but I kind of figured it out after something else he said about this time he tried to get me to fly by throwing me off a building. I know what I was trying to do and why you lied to the press about it afterward."

Nathan's expression slackened ever so slightly before clouding over.

"Fine," he said, rising from his chair. "If you're absolutely sure this is what you want, then I'll see what I can do."

It was another three days before they were able to contact the Haitian. Peter had assumed Nathan would have some way of communicating with the mysterious man on his own but it turned out they needed to go through their mother first and she wouldn't do it without first trying to talk Peter out of it. Over the phone, she was icier than usual, which was saying something. It wasn't that she was the most affectionate woman to begin with but for Peter she'd always reserved a certain amount of warmth. Her obvious disappointment was almost enough to get him to back down but in the end they reached an agreement that ended with her saying, "I love you, Peter but I think you'll be sorry. In fact, I know you will."

With that ominous warning echoing in his mind, Peter went with Nathan the next night to a neutral, anonymous meeting place about an hour outside the city. They drove in silence, Nathan still bristling after the harsh reprimand he'd received from their mother for letting slip the information that had allowed Peter to make this decision in the first place. For his part, Peter became increasingly apprehensive with each passing mile.

The location chosen for the meeting was an empty parking lot next to a ramshackle building in the middle of nowhere. It was hard to tell from the boarded-up windows and sagging roof, but the place must once have been some kind of roadside diner or bar, long since out of use. Not exactly the most welcoming place.

"You don't have to do this," Nathan said once they'd parked. "We can drive back now and just forget that any of this ever happened if that's what you want."

"No," Peter said. "I'm all right." Still, he didn't move.

Nathan made no comment.

"Where is he?" Peter asked.

Nathan peered through the windshield at the dark, seemingly empty parking lot. "I think he's more for emerging from shadows than standing out in the open where people can see him."

"Well, that's just about the least comforting thing I've heard all day," Peter said before taking off his seatbelt and stepping out of the car.

It was a cool enough night but the breeze was warm as Peter walked to the center of the deserted lot, hands deep in his pockets. He turned a circle, looking around for any indication that there was someone there besides him and Nathan. He saw no one until he made the full turn and then, standing a few feet away in the direction he'd originally been facing, stood a well-dressed, expressionless man who didn't so much as blink as Peter fought back what would have been a pretty embarrassing gasp of surprise.

"Peter Petrelli," the man greeted him, his voice smooth and accented.

"You must be…," Peter began but trailed off when he realized he didn't know the man's name.

"Yes," the man said before he could ask. "I understand you've come to me for answers."

"Yeah," Peter said. "I was told you took away my memories."

"And you want to know which memories I took?" the Haitian prodded when Peter hesitated.

"No," Peter said. "I know what you took. Sort of. What I need to know is why."

The Haitian shot a curious glance at Nathan's car before returning his attention to Peter. "That is an interesting question," he said. "But a more interesting question is how you know to ask that question in the first place."

"What do you mean?"

"Consider that the people I usually take memories from do not generally know that anything has been taken from them," the Haitian replied. "They live on without knowing that there are hours, days or even months of their lives missing unless someone tells them so and even then they cannot believe that it is true. But you are aware of the time you have lost. You have always known something is missing."

"Kind of hard not to notice," Peter said. "Waking up one day and six months have passed since I went to sleep."

The Haitian didn't so much as smile.

"So, what? Are you saying you…messed up?" Peter asked.

"No," the Haitian said. "I did as was requested of me."

"Requested by who?"

"By you," the Haitian said.

Peter's heart felt suddenly like it had turned to lead. His stomach dropped unpleasantly.

Without waiting for Peter to reply, the Haitian went on. "The memories I took were unwanted," he said. "The life you were living after the bomb in New York was, as you told me at the time, no kind of life. You were afraid that what had happened there would happen again and you had no desire to go on as you were. At the same time, you knew that if I erased your memories, your powers would go with them. Despite everything that had happened--"

"I didn't want that," Peter finished for him.

The Haitian said nothing.

"So I asked you to…what?"

"Breadcrumbs," the Haitian said.

Peter raised an eyebrow. "Breadcrumbs?"

"Yes," the man said. "That's what you called it."

"I wanted clues," Peter surmised after a moment of thought. "A way to lead myself back in case I ever needed to access my powers again."

"A likely event considering the nature of the world we live in," the Haitian replied.

"So you made it so I would know something was missing," Peter said. "What else did you do? How did you know what to leave behind?"

"There were specific memories and notions you asked me not to touch," the Haitian said. "A handful of them. I did as I was told."

"My brother's ability to fly," Peter said.

"Yes."

"The day I first tried to fly."

Another nod.

Peter bit his lip. "I remembered Claude too."

"Then you remembered him for a reason," the Haitian said.

Peter was silent for a moment as these revelations began to weigh on him. "I pressed the reset button," he said grimly.

"In a manner of speaking," the Haitian replied.

He glanced back at the car. Nathan still sat behind the wheel and in the pale moonlight, he could see his brother's face turned toward them, watching the exchange carefully. He thought of Nathan's insistence that, instead of telling Peter what he knew, Peter should have to remember on his own. Did he really believe that Peter could remember or had he just been trying to protect him from what he thought Peter didn't want himself to know?

"I won't remember anything else, will I?" Peter asked. "Beyond those breadcrumbs, I mean." Claude had said as much. He just wanted to make sure.

"No," the Haitian said. "And I cannot give back what has been taken. That is not how my gift works."

"You should have that printed on a business card or something. Like a disclaimer," Peter remarked. When the Haitian said nothing, he asked, "What about the memory lapses I have? The not being able to remember people's names or where I live. Was that something I asked for too?"

"Another clue wrapped in a natural side effect of what I do," the Haitian replied.

"Will it ever get better?"

"I cannot say," the Haitian said. "But it will get worse if more is erased from your memory. You should know that should you ever decide that your new memories are ones you cannot live with." There was a faint rebuke in the other man's words.

"I understand," Peter said. "Thanks for coming."

The Haitian inclined his head slightly. Without a word, he turned and walked away. Peter watched him go until he'd disappeared in the darkness. Probably back to a car he had parked somewhere, hidden. After a minute, Peter made his way back to Nathan.

"That didn't take long," he said as Peter got in.

"He's not exactly a verbal guy," Peter said.

"Did you find out what you wanted to know?"

Peter nodded.

"And?"

"And what?"

"I don't know," Nathan said. "How do you feel about it?"

Peter looked out the window, into the blackness of the surrounding night. "I haven't decided yet," he said.


	17. Chapter 17

**The Price of a Memory  
****Part 17/17**

"I bloody well kissed him, didn't I?"

It was almost worth the indignity of having admitted such a thing aloud just to see Suresh's usually composed expression slacken into a gape as his fork froze halfway between his plate and his mouth. It took longer than normal for Suresh to school his features back into a look of polite interest, the kind adults generally used on troubled kids prone to random outbursts.

"Oh?" he said with careful neutrality.

"Don't look at me like that," Claude said. "You said you wanted me to talk about it. I'm talking about it."

In fact, if Claude recalled correctly, Suresh had orchestrated these faux family dinners for the sole purpose of getting Claude to open up about just how bereft he felt without the Boy Wonder around to keep him company. Claude would sooner have dropped dead than go anywhere near the idea that he might have missed Peter at all or been in any way affected by his absence in the three weeks since he'd been gone. But even he was not immune to the occasional need to unload and Molly had been telling a particularly boring story about a useless children's show she'd been watching earlier in the day. It had seemed like the right time to finally confess.

"Okay," Suresh said, his tone still one of patient tolerance.

Claude sighed, discontent. He poked at his food with his fork. Suresh was beginning to squirm just a bit.

"When was this?" Suresh asked. "The kiss, I mean."

"The night he left," Claude said. "In Isaac Mendez's loft. It just sort of happened."

"Do you love him?" Molly asked.

Leave it to a child to drop a question like that casual as can be, all eager enthusiasm like this was all just some kind of screwed up fairy princess story to her. Like things were ever that easy.

"Most days I don't even like him," Claude said.

"Does he love you?" Suresh asked a little too shrewdly.

"He didn't pull away or slap me afterward," Claude said. "Must count for something."

Suresh hesitated. "But he did leave the city immediately thereafter."

"Well," Claude said. "Not immediately."

Still, it was near enough the truth to say that he had. In retrospect, Claude really should have known better than to agree to leave Peter alone in Isaac Mendez's loft to mull things over on his own after the kiss. But the moment they'd shared had left him feeling dazed and complacent. So much so that when he'd arrived at Suresh's flat the next day to find nothing of Peter but a hurried phone message saying he'd gone to see his brother and not to worry or expect him back any time soon, he'd actually been surprised.

Naturally, Peter's absence had alarmed him at first. But back then he'd thought the boy would only be gone for a few days. A week at most, depending on how long it took Nathan Petrelli to complete the unenviable job of having to break the news to Peter that the boy's memory loss had been his own doing. Then he'd come back and they could pick up where they'd left off that night in the artist's loft.

What Claude had forgotten was that no explanation from Nathan Petrelli came without a liberal dose of manipulative guilt and brainwashing to go with it. Three weeks gone, there was no telling what kind of damage Petrelli might have done. No telling what it was keeping Peter there except that maybe he didn't have a compelling enough reason to come back. Not after everything that had happened.

And Claude knew he wasn't the only one thinking it. Even Suresh had given up the illusion of optimism, a strategy he'd insisted on at first purely for Molly's sake. But even she was smart enough to see right through his constant reassurances that Peter still loved them all despite the fact that he'd gone off to spend time with his real family. Loving them and being a physical presence in their lives were two entirely different things.

"Just as well, though," Claude said. "That he left when he did, I mean."

"Why is that?" Suresh asked.

"He had a girlfriend once," Claude said. "Well, a sort of a girlfriend."

"Simone Deveaux," Suresh said. "Her boyfriend was the painter who saw the future."

"Right," Claude said, somehow unsurprised that Suresh knew this story. "At any rate, he pined after her for months, didn't he? Then she slept with him and he was completely besotted with her, all doe-eyed and thinking they were in love. It was disgusting."

"So?"

"So," Claude said. "Clearly, Peter is an idiot."

The leap in logic left Suresh temporarily lost but then he seemed to put two and two together. "And you're not sure if you want to involve yourself with an idiot," Suresh said. "Particularly one who flees the scene the moment you show him how you feel."

"You don't have to phrase it in such grandiose terms, you know," Claude said. "I kissed him and he ran away. We all get the point."

Suresh smirked. "Do you know what I think?" he asked musingly.

"Dare I ask," Claude muttered.

"I think he remembered you," Suresh said. "Over six months of his memories gone without a trace. All of it a complete blank to him except for a few scraps here and there. And one of those scraps is you." He pointed his fork at Claude. "Not me. Not Simone Deveaux. Not even Nathan. He remembered _you_." He twisted a piece of spaghetti onto his utensil, avoiding Claude's eyes. "Even you have to admit that that must mean something."

They settled back into a contemplative silence, finishing their dinner and moving all at once to clear their places. Trying to decide if it was his turn to do the washing up, Claude couldn't help but begin to wonder when it was he'd managed to become so domestic. Before he could pinpoint the exact moment, a sound came from the hallway like the scraping of footsteps and the jangling of keys being inserted into the lock. He and Suresh exchanged quick looks before the door opened, revealing the unexpected visitor.

"Peter!" Molly cried, running up to him and wrapping herself around his waist in an unself-conscious display of affection possible only in pre-adolescent children.

"Hi," Peter said, returning Molly's eager embrace, freeing himself just enough to offer an awkward wave in Suresh and Claude's direction.

"You're home," Suresh said, then flinched at his choice of words. "That is, you're here," he amended.

"Yeah," Peter said, stepping away from the little girl, who beamed up at him. "Sorry. I would have told you I was coming but…" He trailed off. No knowing what exactly the "but" entailed.

"We've just finished dinner," Suresh said. To Claude, he couldn't have sounded more like someone's housewife if he'd tried. "There was some left over if you're hungry."

"Maybe in a minute," Peter said. "I, um, I actually came to talk to Claude." He looked up for the first time since he'd come into the room and met Claude's gaze square on, his expression unreadable except for the question in his eyes.

"Oh," Suresh said with mild surprise.

"Yeah," Claude said. "Oh."

Peter cleared his throat in the awkward pause that followed. "Maybe we could go in Molly's room?" he suggested.

It was that or the bathroom if Peter insisted on having a private chat without leaving Suresh's place. Claude lifted his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. Confidence seeming to leak from him like a sieve, Peter moved toward the designated room and Claude followed close behind, throwing a glance at Suresh over his shoulder before closing the door between them.

"All right, let's have it," Claude said, still facing the door. "Sentimental farewells are not my forte--"

Whatever else he might have said, it was cut off when Peter's hands came down on his shoulders, forcing him to turn around so they faced each other. Taken by surprise, Claude's token resistance to the abrupt move amounted to a muffled, half-hearted protest just as the boy leaned up and captured Claude's mouth with his own with such power that all other thoughts vanished from Claude's mind forthwith. He heard himself moan as Peter pressed against him, taking the opportunity to slip his hands underneath the boy's shirt, running his fingers up and down Peter's slim torso while Peter kept a firm grasp on his backside.

It had been a long time. Otherwise, Claude might have employed something more like grace and tact when he propelled them both toward the bed in the middle of the room. Instead, all he felt was his own desperation to finish what they'd started three weeks ago, not sure if he would ever be given the chance to do so again.

He wasn't even aware that Peter was trying to say anything until he attempted to push the younger man down onto the mattress only to be stopped by two hands laying themselves flat against his chest.

"Wait," Peter said, breathless.

Claude nearly growled with frustration.

"Don't," he said, pressing their foreheads together. Dimly, he became aware that one of his hands was still holding the fly to Peter's trousers and he let go of it with reluctance. Fucking tease.

"Don't what?" Peter asked.

" 'I can't do this,'" Claude said. "Don't say it. Not now."

Peter pulled his head back so that they could look each other in the eye. "That's not what I was going to say."

Claude blinked. "No?" he said.

"Not exactly," Peter said, a smile on his swollen lips. "I mean…" He pressed himself against Claude to illustrate his point. Claude hissed a little at the spark of pleasure brought on by the brief contact. "Molly's room probably isn't the best place but, well…I've been waiting to do this for a couple of weeks now."

Claude shook his head, wearing his own ironic smile. "Funny, because I've only just realized it, but I think I've been waiting for this since last year." He moved his lips to Peter's neck. "Sheets can be washed, you know," he added helpfully.

Peter laughed. "Claude," he said. "Don't you want to know what I was going to say?"

"I'm on tenterhooks, me," Claude said. "But first thing's first." He reached for Peter's fly again but Peter's hands came down to stop him. He waited for Claude to meet his gaze, darkened now with lust, before saying,

"There's something I need to show you first."

Claude wasn't sure, but this didn't sound promising. Still, the sooner he let Peter do his show and tell, the sooner they could get back to more enjoyable versions of the same game and so he decided to indulge the boy.

"What's that?" he asked.

Peter looked toward the window. Outside it, the fire escape was illuminated by borrowed light from nearby buildings and a few distant streetlights. The boy lifted the window with effort before climbing out of it. Confused, Claude followed him, the less than stable structure creaking somewhat under their combined weight. Shivering in the cool night air, he watched as Peter stepped toward the railing, first straddling it and then standing on the other side, only his firm grip on the rusty pole keeping him from plunging into the darkness of the alley below.

"Couldn't you wait to kill yourself until after we've had sex?" Claude asked.

Peter snorted but didn't say anything as, with an obvious effort of will, he made himself let go of the railing. Only his heels still balanced on the platform on which they stood and for a moment, it looked like the boy really was going to slip. Except before he had the chance to fall, he was deliberately stepping out away from the fire escape, one foot in front of the other into thin air.

Reacting purely on instinct, Claude dove to catch him but was brought up short when, instead of plummeting into a Dumpster, Peter stayed level with the fire escape. But it wasn't until he moved out a few more steps that Claude recognized what he was seeing.

"Bloody hell," he breathed in honest amazement.

"I've been practicing," Peter said. "Nathan showed me. And then I started doing it without him around."

"Interesting," Claude said.

"The other day I got a paper cut while I was reading a magazine and it healed right in front of me," Peter said. "As if it was never there. I also overheard someone else's thoughts. And I found you just by thinking of you. I knew you were here."

"That's a new one," Claude said.

Peter looked down at his feet, which continued to be supported by nothing. "You didn't think I was coming back."

Suddenly, Claude didn't need to ask exactly whose thoughts Peter had overheard.

"Why did you?" he asked. "Come back, that is." He paused. "Other than the promise of great sex, of course."

Peter grinned at him, coming back toward the fire escape. He didn't need help as he moved back over to the other side but Claude reached out anyway, grabbing him round the waist and holding him steady as the fire escape made another of its unhappy groaning sounds beneath them.

"Breadcrumbs," Peter said and with their chests pressed together as they were, it took Claude a second to realize this was meant to be an answer to his question.

"Breadcrumbs," Claude repeated. When Peter didn't elaborate, he added, "I'm lost."

"Exactly," Peter said before capturing Claude's lips with his own.

The kiss grew heated quickly and Claude got the feeling before long that they were giving the neighbors quite a show. But if the people watching from windows hadn't died of shock from seeing Peter floating fifty feet above the ground, then this wouldn't kill them either. Or if it did, Claude wasn't in a position to care much as he wrapped Peter in his arms and reflected on the good fortune of second chances.

END

_Author's Note: I began posting my work on this site a few months ago as a back up in case something happened to my livejournal. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to give the stories a second life here and I want to offer another thank you to everyone who's been reading and especially to those who have left such generous reviews. _

_That said, The Price of a Memory has a sequel. An entirely optional, admittedly flawed sequel called All the People We Used to Know. I'll be combing it over for any leftover typos and posting it here on in pieces as I did with the previous stories or, if you are interested, you can read it in its entirety over at my journal now, the address for which is listed as the homepage in my profile. _

_Thanks so much for reading! I hope you continue to enjoy!_


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